Interpersonal Resilience Inventory: Assessing positive and negative interactions during hardships and COVID‐19

Abstract

AbstractWhen people face difficult life situations, close interpersonal interactions that are positive (supportive, warm, and intimate) and negative (critical, withdrawing, and unhelpful) can be assessed with the Interpersonal Resilience Inventory and should be distinct from social support indices (structural support and perceived support schema), associated with stress and well‐being, and salient across different stress contexts. Online participants completed the Interpersonal Resilience Inventory when facing family or financial stressors (n = 327) and the COVID‐19 pandemic (n = 180). Confirmatory factor analysis, discrimination, correlations, and models regressing stress and well‐being on positive and negative interactions indicated that scales are distinct and explain unique variance in stress and well‐being beyond general social support. Results highlight the unique function of perceived interactions. This study expands previous medical and couple‐specific work on perceptions of positive and negative interactions by assessing them across important relationships, in two unique stress contexts (family and financial hardships, and COVID‐19), and after controlling for other types of social support (support schemas and structural support). This work is important for building parsimonious theories of perceived interactions that may be generalizable across relationships and stress contexts and may illuminate social support pathways to well‐being.