Assessing social support and satisfaction in the elderly: Development of a brief assessment instrument, the index of social support

The construction and validation of a brief instrument for assessing social support in the elderly is described. The Index of Social Support (ISS) has nine items and provides separate measures of a person's perceived availability of support and his or her satisfaction with it. The two scales are shown to have high internal consistencies (coefficient alphas of 0.84 and 0.81) and the score totals discriminated significantly between non‐depressed elderly people and elderly people who had suffered a recent onset of depression. Principal components analysis showed that the perceived availability of support subscale provides a single factor accounting for 41% of the variance. Item analysis suggested that perceived availability of friends and good neighbours discriminated better between non‐depressed and depressed subjects than items based on feelings of family belongingness or having available someone with whom one could talk frankly.