The quantification of social contacts and resources

This report was prepared for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as part of the Rand Health Insurance Experiment (HIE), which was designed to investigate the effects of different health care financing arrangements on the use of personal medical services, quality of care, health status, and satisfaction with care. It is the second of two Rand reports that focus on HIE measures of social well-being. The earlier report (R-1987/4-HEW) presented a review of the literature in an attempt to clarify how social well-being (then called social health) has been defined and measured by others and to identify major issues involved in developing and validating social well-being measures. The present document describes empirical studies designed to yield a set of scoring rules for HIE questionnaire items measuring social contacts and social resources. Additionally, it examines relationships among these questionnaire items and evaluates multi-item measures of social well-being.