Assessing perceived support and countersupport with remembered interactions : validation of the inventory of perceived support and countersupport interactions.

Existing measures of support assess schemas of support, but specific perceptions of support are theoretically distinct and consequential for affective coping. Moreover, such perceptions can be decomposed into two independent dimensions of perceived support and countersupport. Therefore, five pilot studies were used to develop and evaluate a two-dimensional measure capable of assessing perceived support and countersupport. This instrument, the Inventory of Perceived Support and Countersupport Interactions (IPSCI), was validated in a sample of 244 stressed individuals recruited using Amazon Mechanical Turk. The IPSCI demonstrated good psychometric properties, including factor validity, convergent, discriminant, and incremental convergent validity, and item discrimination. Perceived support and countersupport were independently related to episodic and schematic affective coping outcomes. The IPSCI can be used to assess perceived support and countersupport across research settings.