Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MSPSS)

Social support has been considered an important source for the development of coping strategies (Greenglass, 1993), and in numerous studies, social support has been analyzed along with religious coping as a reliable variable for effective coping when dealing with stressful events (Prati and Pietrantoni, 2009). Thus, we use it in the present study to compare SB with this widely used strategy.

This scale was developed by Zimet et al. (1988) to assess the perception of social support in family relationships, friends, and significant others. The questionnaire has a total of 12 items written on a Likert-type scale with five answer options (from 0 = Nothing, to 4 = Very much). For this research, only the four items of the subscale “Other significant people” were used, taken from the adaptation to Spanish by Trejos-Herrera et al. (2018), using the average of the items as the final score. The present researchers decided to use this dimension since it allowed participants to respond in a broad way regarding their sources of support (e.g., “there is a special person who is close to me when I need it”). For the present study, this subdimension yielded a Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of α = 0.94.