ORIGINAL PAPER Development of the Scale of Perceived Social Support in HIV (PSS-HIV)

Abstract Social support (SS) plays a key role for HIV/ AIDS prevention and disease management. Numerous gen-eral and disease-specific SS instruments have been developed and perception of support has been increasingly considered, though no scales have been specifically developed to measure perceived social support (PSS) in HIV/AIDS. To help fill this gap a 12-item scale was developed. The study comprised 406 (HIV(?) and HIV(-)) participants from Chile and the UK. A principal component factor analysis yielded three factors explaining 77.0 % of the total variance: Belonging, Esteem and Self-development with Cronbach a of 0.759, 0.882 and 0.927 respectively and 0.893 on the full scale. The PSS-HIV is brief, easy-to-apply, available in English and Spanish and evaluates the perception of supportive social interactions. Further research is needed to corroborate its capacity to detec