IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/geronb/v76y2021isupplement_3ps238-s250..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Resilience and Social Support-Giving Scales: Conceptual and Empirical Validation

Author

Listed:
  • Louise Hawkley
  • Kristin Wroblewski
  • Kathleen A Cagney
  • Linda J Waite
  • Merril Silverstein

Abstract

ObjectivesThis report introduces National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP) data users to 2 new measures—one that assesses older adults’ resilience, defined as personal attributes that indicate an adaptive reserve that can be drawn on during adversity, and a second that expands on existing measures of social support received from others to also assess social support given to close others.MethodData from 4,604 NSHAP respondents born 1920–1965 were used to conduct psychometric analyses and validation of our measures of resilience and social support-giving.ResultsScale reliabilities were acceptable for the 4-item resilience scale, and the 2-item scales for family support-giving and friend support-giving. The 2 spousal support-giving items did not cohere well as a single scale. The resilience scale exhibited significant correlations with criterion validation variables, even after adjusting for correlated personality traits. The support-giving scales, and the spousal support-giving items, also exhibited significant correlations with criteria, and with the resilience scale, even after adjusting for social support receipt. Scale means exhibited demographic differences.DiscussionThe resilience and social support-giving measures have acceptable psychometric characteristics (with the exception of spousal support-giving), convergent validity, and predictive utility net of related variables. NSHAP data users are offered several suggestions (key points) in the use of these measures in future research.

Suggested Citation

  • Louise Hawkley & Kristin Wroblewski & Kathleen A Cagney & Linda J Waite & Merril Silverstein, 2021. "Resilience and Social Support-Giving Scales: Conceptual and Empirical Validation," The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, The Gerontological Society of America, vol. 76(Supplemen), pages 238-250.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:geronb:v:76:y:2021:i:supplement_3:p:s238-s250.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/geronb/gbab091
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:geronb:v:76:y:2021:i:supplement_3:p:s238-s250.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/psychsocgerontology .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.