ABSTRACT
In 1977 Dean and Lin wrote that a thorough search of the social support literature “failed to uncover any measures of social support with either known and/or acceptable properties of reliability and validity” (p. 409). A great deal of progress has been made in the assessment of social support since that statement. The field has advanced beyond “the plethora of idiosyncratic measures (often post hoc) exhibiting dubious relevance to unclear concepts” (Vaux & Harrison, 1985, p. 245), which characterized early research. We now have a good number of instruments that have been thoughtfully designed and subjected to some psychometric evaluation.
