Social support of students of the Bežigrad Gymnasium (1998)

The updated MTMM measurement model, designed by Saris and Andrews (1991), was used to assess the measurement quality of the four dimensions of the social support because it can assess the validity, reliability and impact of the method for each variable separately. Based on theoretical and empirical insights, four network generators were created to measure the theoretically justified dimensions of social support. The content of network generators for measuring material, information and emotional support and socialisation was adapted to the characteristics of experimental groups — eight grades of the third year of the Bežigrad High School in Ljubljana. A close-to-complex experimental plan is designed to find factors that influence the quality of social support measurement using a survey questionnaire. The experimental design contains both the characteristics of the measuring instrument as well as the characteristics of the updated MTMM model, which may affect the estimates of the reliability, validity and impact of methods that the researchers have already recognised as relevant to the quality of the data obtained through the survey. The experimental design included four different scales (binary scale, five graded ordinal scale with marked extremes, five graded ordinal scales with all marked values and score with line length), two techniques of data collection (listing and memory enumeration), giving and receiving social support (basic questions — reception and reciprocal questions — giving support) and time between consecutive repetitions of measurements (20 minutes or one week).