A Persian Version of the Social Support Questionnaire (SSQ)

The availability of a reliable and valid measurement to assess social support represents an important precondition to promote health research. The Social Support Questionnaire (SSQ) was simple to complete and developed by Sarason, Levine, Basham, & Sarason (1983), so it had been decided to translate it into Farsi to examine its psychometric properties. Social support can be defined as perceived availability of people who care about us; the certainty that there are people whom we can rely on makes it easier for us to feel good. Social support is composed of three types: instrumental, informational, and emotional. There is lots of evidence indicating that perceived social support is an important process that can reduce stress and foster positive health outcomes, such as physical and psychological well-being. Emotional support particularly was found of buffering effect of various stressful life events consequently having a positive effect on physical and psychological health. A convenient sample of 270 individuals aged 18-65 years old recruited from two private English language teaching institutions and from the Ministry of Health and Education. The data were analyzed with: one-sample Kolmogorov- Smirnov Z test, Mann Whitney U-tests, ANOVAs, ANCOVAs, Spearmen’s rho correlation and Cronbach’s alpha was calculated. Women showed a higher satisfaction with social support compared to men whereas there was no gender-difference in the number of reported supporting persons. There was no significant main effect for marital status relating to the number of reported supporting individuals. Neither the number of reported supporting persons nor the satisfaction with social support was significantly associated with the age of the subjects. The internal consistency in terms of Cronbach’s alpha for both scales were high (number of supporting individuals. 95 and satisfaction. 96. The Farsi version of the SSQ has satisfactory psychometric properties supporting empirical evidence for its use in research and practice.