Revising the Lubben Social Network Scale for use in residential long-term care settings

Purposes: We revised the Lubben Social Network Scale (LSNS) to develop a measure of social support specific to residential long-term care (LTC) settings, the LSNS-LTC with five domains (i.e., family, friends, residents, volunteers, and staff). Methods: The authors modified the LSNS-18 to capture sources of social support specific to LTC, specifically relationships with residents, volunteers, and staff. We piloted the resultant 28-item measure with 64 LTC residents. Fifty-four respondents provided adequate information for analyses that included descriptive statistics and reliability coefficients. Results: Twenty of the items performed well (had correlations >0.3, overall alpha=0.85) and were retained. Three items required modification. The five items related to volunteers were eliminated due to extensive (>15%) missing data resulting in a proposed 23-item measure. Discussion: We identified, and to some degree quantified, supportive relationships within the LTC environment, while developing a self-report tool to measure social support in these settings.