Appraisals of social support: Love, respect, and involvement

The multifaceted nature of social support has become more widely recognized in theory and research. Specifically, a consensus is emerging on the distinctions among support resources, behavior, and appraisals. The present study focuses on support appraisals with the aim of studying the degree to which the Social Support Appraisals Scale (SS-A) might be used to assess distinct appraisals of repect, love, and involvement. SS-A data from five heterogeneous samples (including students, mature women students, fathers, and adolescents) were subjected to factor analysis. The factors that emerged were highly invariant across samples and largely reflected respect, involvement, and love, though the “love” factor might also be interpreted as a “family” factor. Patterns of convergent and divergent validity with subscales reflecting constructs of love, respect, and involvement from two other support appraisal measures were equivocal. Some implications for theory and research of differentiating support appraisals are discussed.