Developing the Situated Assessment Method (SAM²) to assess social connectedness and social support

Abstract

Social connectedness and social support play central roles in human cultures and have consistently been linked to mental and physical health. Accurately measuring these constructs is essential for understanding them and for developing interventions to increase them. Most current assessment instruments are unsituated, given that they ask an individual to assess their social connectedness and social support by abstracting across unspecified life situations to establish general impressions. To include situations in the assessment process, we developed a situated psychometric instrument based on the Situated Assessment Method (SAM²) to assess social connectedness and social support. Using this instrument, 189 individuals evaluated 24 different situations for social connectedness and social support, and also evaluated 8 predictors of these constructs established in the scientific and clinical literatures. As expected, we observed large reliable individual differences in both social connectedness and social support, along with substantial situational effects and situation by individual interactions. Additionally, we established high construct and content validity for both measures, demonstrating that they offer meaningful assessments of their underlying constructs. Interestingly, both SAM2 measures were only moderately related to well-established unsituated measures of social connectedness and social support, indicating that situated and unsituated measures capture different information.