VALIDATION OF A SCALE OF PERCEIVED SOCIAL SUPPORT IN A GROUP OF ELDERS UNDER CONTROL IN A HYPERTENSION PROGRAM IN THE METROPOLITAN REGION

Abstract

The study evaluates the psychometric characteristics of the multidimensional social support scale of Zimet et al. (1988). With this purpose, a pilot application was carried out in twelve elders, showing that it was necessary to make some adaptations to the instrument. Then, the adapted instrument was applied in seventy-six elders from the Metropolitan Region, using the program SPSS for the statistical analysis. The results showed that the way the items behaved, allowed the application of the scale with the original items. The exploratory factorial analysis gave as a result a model of two factors supported by the oblique rotation and the confirmatory factorial analysis. The social support perceived did not have significant differences by sex, but it did among groups of age.