| Summary: | Kinship caregiving is a growing and viable form of care for children who would otherwise enter the foster care system. Having a supportive social network is essential to help kinship caregivers meet the complex and stressful demands of caring for a young relative, especially the informal kinship caregivers who care for children outside the supervision of the child welfare system. The Family Support Scale (FSS), which was initially developed for families of children with developmental disabilities, is a promising assessment tool for measuring social support among kinship caregivers. The researchers' previous research on the FSS among informal kinship caregivers (2012) suggested that the assessment tool consisted of four latent factors: Spouse/Partner's Family and Peers, Formal Professional Support, Informal Community Support, and Familial and Peer Support. For the current study, the researchers tested two hypotheses: (a) the FSS among kinship caregivers is comprised of four latent factors, and (b) these four factors comprise a second-order social support latent construct. The hypotheses were tested using a confirmatory factor analysis. Investigation of model it suggested that the hierarchical model and the four-factor model were comparable. he results build on the authors' initial validation of the FSS and provide beginning support for the construct validity of the FSS among kinship caregivers by demonstrating that the internal structure of the scale is consistent with past research. More research is needed to further evaluate the construct validity of the FSS among kinship caregivers, including assessing the convergent and discriminate validity of the scale.
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