Social Support Questionnaire among psychiatric patients with various diagnoses and normal controls

Background: Several studies have pointed to the importance of social support in influencing the onset and course of a psychiatric disorder such as schizophrenia or depression. However, only a few have studied it across groups of patients with various psychiatric diagnoses employing a standardized assessment procedure. Method: We administered the Social Support Questionnaire (SSQ); a measure of social support recommended by two recent reviews on the subject, to 1,369 psychiatric outpatients visiting the 23 psychiatric hospitals and clinics all over Japan and to 178 healthy controls recruited from among employees at a general hospital. Results: The original two-factor structure of the SSQ was confirmed and internal consistency reliability for the Number and Satisfaction subscales was satisfactory, with Cronbach's alphas above 0.85. When the SSQ scores were compared between psychiatric patients and healthy controls, it was found that the psychiatric patients in general reported significantly lower Number as well as Satisfaction scores than the healthy controls. When individual diagnostic categories were considered almost all the diagnostic groups reported significantly lower Number scores, but only the patients with anxiety disorder, mood disorder, schizophrenia, and V codes reported significantly lower Satisfaction scores than the healthy controls. Compared with patients with other diagnoses, the schizophrenic patients stood out as reporting significantly lower Number and Satisfaction scores. Conclusion: The findings demonstrated the internal consistency reliability, factor validity, and construct validity of the SSQ among psychiatric as well as normal populations, and exemplified the feasibility of applying the SSQ as a standard measure of social support among psychiatric patients.