Social support assessment in Brazilian studies: conceptual aspects and measures

This study investigated the different ways of evaluating the social support in Brazilian studies. A surveying of scientific Brazilian publications from 1987 to 2007 was done in the Indexpsi, Pepsic, SciELO and Lilacs databases according to keywords social support and social network. Fifty-five studies included some type of assessing social support in Brazilian samples. The results indicated a rise in the number of studies about social support assessment in the last years using interviews to investigate received and perceived support, predominantly. However, the construction was applied without theoretical basis and was associated with many other concepts, sometimes without an appropriate articulation. Besides, there were evidences of lacking reliable, valid and standardized instruments to Brazilian population by considering the instruments currently used and revised by this study.