Investigating the Reliability and Validity of the Social Connectedness Instrument Among U.S. Adults

Growing evidence shows that poor social connectedness is becoming a public health threat, with rising prevalence and connections to poor mental and physical health across the lifespan. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop feasible and effective social connectedness interventions. There is limited evidence for the effectiveness of current interventions, with studies recommending tailoring the intervention to an individual’s specific social connection needs. However, previous measures of social connectedness provide little information about potentially modifiable contributors of poor connection. Thus, the Social Connectedness Instrument (SCI) was developed to fill in this gap by proposing two novel latent constructs of perceived social disconnectedness: Psychoemotional Disconnectedness (PED), which consists of feelings of disconnectedness based on emotional contributors (e.g., fear of rejection, social anxiety) and Psychosocial Disconnectedness (PSD), which consists of feelings of disconnectedness based on social contributors (e.g., poor social skills, social exclusion). The initial validation study on the SCI only contained homogenous university students, limiting the generalizability of the tool. To fill in this gap, the current study examined the psychometric properties of the SCI among a sample of 919 U.S. adults. Results demonstrated that the SCI performed adequately on model fit indices, measurement invariance across sex, age, race/ethnicity, education level, and religious affiliation, internal reliability, internal convergent validity (only PED), discriminant validity, concurrent validity, and external convergent validity. Overall, these findings support the reliability and validity of the SCI in the population of U.S. adults. However, evidence for the use of the SCI to inform and improve social connectedness interventions is still needed.