Developing measures to assess social support among homeless and poor people

Abstract

Two commonly employed measures of social support were assessed in a sample of 144 homeless and poor adults. Both the Interpersonal Support Evaluation List (ISEL) and Social Network Interview (SNI) demonstrated acceptable psychometric properties. Reliability coefficients over a one-week interval ranged from 0.62 to 0.85 for ISEL variables and 0.74 to 0.82 for several key SNI variables. A number of significant predictors of variables derived from one or both measures were identified which supported the construct validity of the measures and which were generally consistent with prior research on homeless and similar samples. These predictors included gender, current psychological distress, a diagnosis of severe mental illness, and amount of time spent homeless. Social support was found to have a significant stress-buffering effect in one of four analyses done: Stress was positively related to physical health symptoms for those with small SNI family networks (but not for those with larger networks). © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.