Research That Matters (January 17 - 20, 2008)

Purpose: Mothers from low-income families are three times as likely to drop out of college as female students without children. Yet the economic and social benefits of postsecondary education for low-income mothers have been well documented. These issues underscore the importance of examining the barriers to completing college for these women. The intent of this study, therefore, is to develop and validate an instrument, the School Support Scale, aimed at measuring the perception of emotional and tangible community college support among mothers from low income families. Methods: Constructs from social support theory (i.e., appraisal support, emotional support, instrumental support, and informative support) were used to operationalize support. These constructs were collapsed into two distinct dimensions—emotional support and tangible support—to create the initial scale. Based on the definition of school support and an extensive literature search, a 24-item pool was created. A sample of 240 student mothers between ages 18 and 50 who were enrolled at a community college participated in this validation study. We used confirmatory factor analysis to test factorial validity and examined the descriptive statistics and alpha reliability to estimate the hypothesized measure. Results: We conducted focus groups with experts in this area of research to assess the scale's content validity. The experts evaluated the scale items and confirmed that the items were grounded in the literature. The 24-item scale was reduced to a 22-item scale showing excellent reliabilities for the total scale (á = .957), tangible subscale (á = .906), and emotional subscale (á = .944). While the initial scale had sufficient reliability; two items among the tangible subscale were problematic based on their low intercorrelations, the potential for increasing coefficient alpha, and conceptual misinterpretations. These items were eliminated. The revised 22-item scale demonstrated good factorial validity that supported the dual dimensional structure with items loading on appropriate domains as hypothesized and with adequate fit indices for the confirmatory model (NFI = .838, CFI = .874, GFI = .767). Convergent validity was established as the scale correlated significantly with family support (r = -.310) and peer support (r = -.430). Discriminant validity was also established as unrelated variables, age and major, had nonsignificant correlations of .019 and .025, respectively. Predictive-criterion validity was established by its significant relationship with the college commitment scale (r = -.687) in explaining 50% of the variance. Implications: Findings indicate that the 22-item scale shows potential as an “early-warning” tool for college counselors and administrators to identify and remove barriers that contribute to problems associated with college retention of low income mothers. This information can be used to strategize for effective interventions that help student-mothers graduate. The implications would not only benefit student-mothers but their family, the community, and society at-large in their ability to make significant economic and social contributions. Future revalidation studies could establish this scale as a viable instrument to be used in multiple institutional settings such as four year universities and private or public colleges, with a diverse population of student-mothers in other regions of the country.