The child and adolescent social support scale: Assessing four types of perceived support from five sources

The Child and Adolescent Social Support Scale (CASSS) is one of the most commonly used measures of perceived social support with children and adolescents. The psychometric properties supporting the subscales representing the various sources of support are well-established. However, less support is available for the subscales representing the various types of support within support sources. The purpose of the current study was to investigate the degree to which the empirically derived dimensions of the CASSS align with its multidimensional theoretical framework consisting of four types of perceived support (i.e., emotional, informational, appraisal, and instrumental) from each of five sources of support (i.e., parent, teacher, classmate, close friend, and people at school) with a diverse sample of 7th and 8th grade students (N = 901). Four confirmatory factor models were tested and compared. Results indicated good fit for models that included one or more of the following structures: source by type (e.g., parent emotional support), source (e.g., parent support including all types), and overall social support. Strong/scalar invariance was found for these structures across socioeconomic resources, but only weak/metric invariance was found for these structures across gender. Evidence from this study supports the structural fidelity of the CASSS as a measure of the type of social support perceived from important sources and suggests caution in comparing CASSS scores across gender.

Significance Statement: Results of the current study support the use of the CASSS to measure type of perceived social support from different sources in middle school students. However, caution is warranted when comparing scores across gender, given results indicating that CASSS scores may not be comparable across middle school boys and girls.