Online

van Stolk-Cooke, Katherine Ann

Psychology

2021

Ph. D.

Social support is considered to be a protective factor against the development of PTSD after trauma. However, examinations of the social support-PTSD relationship have relied primarily on the self-reports of trauma-exposed individuals to the exclusion of their support providers. A new measure, the Supportive Other Experiences Questionnaire (SOEQ) was developed based on social support theory, prior research and psychometrics in order to capture important components of social support from the perspective of the support provider. Concerned Significant Others (CSOs) recruited via Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) platform who served as support providers to a traumatically injured romantic partner were recruited to respond to SOEQ candidate items and other relevant measures of psychopathology and relational factors. Confirmatory factor analytic results of SOEQ candidate items provide evidence for three social support subtypes (i.e., informational, tangible, and emotional) and two social support processes (i.e., provision frequency, provision difficulty). Evidence of convergent and discriminant validity provide good psychometric support for the measure. Evidence of construct validity was derived from support for two hypotheses: (1) Difficulty providing social support is negatively associated with support provider perceptions of trauma survivor recovery, (2) Social support provision frequency is positively associated with relationship satisfaction.