The family stress and support inventory (FSSI)

The Family Stress and Support Inventory (FSSI) is a new self-report family assessment instrument that is theoretically grounded in sociological and family stress theory and designed to provide a brief, reliable, valid, quantifiable, and global assessment of the intrafamilial stress and support variables. With reference to clearly defined constructs, the respondents rate on a continuum of 1-10 the amount of stress and support that they feel from each individual family member. Scale analysis and psychometric evaluation were completed on a randomly selected sample of 382 people chosen from family practice clinics throughout Minnesota and the University of Minnesota faculty and staff. The test-retest correlations are r = .78, p = .00 for the FSSI Support scale, and r = .68, p = .00 for the FSSI Stress scale. Correlation with social desirability is negligible (r = -.01, p = ns for FSSI Support; r = .11, p = .02 for FSSI Stress). The FSSI Stress scale demonstrates moderately high concurrent validity with the Family Inventory of Life Events and Changes (FILE), another family stress measure (r = .50, p = .00), indicating that both assess similar, but not identical, family stress dimensions. The correlation between the FSSI Support scale and the Family Inventory of Resources for Management (FIRM), another measure of family resources, however, was only r = .10, p = .05, indicating that these two measures evaluate different family support dimensions. The FSSI has many potential applications in family medicine research and clinical care where the intrafamilial stress and support variables must be quantified.