Social Support from Family and from Friends

Social support was assessed by five items derived from scales developed for the Medical Outcome Study (MOS) Social Support (Sherbourne and Stewart 1991). Participants were asked to indicate how often different kinds of support were available to them through family and friends or other acquaintances, on a 5-point scale ranging from ‘none of the time’ to ‘all of the time’. Two social support measures (ranging from 0 to 5) were constructed by averaging across items: a family measure, and a friends and acquaintances measure. The MOS Social Support Survey has been used in several studies among homeless people (O’Toole et al. 1999; Nyamathi et al. 2000) and showed high convergent and discriminant validity and internal consistency (Sherbourne and Stewart 1991). The selection of items used in the present study has been successfully used in previous longitudinal research among homeless populations (Lako et al. 2013; Krabbenborg et al. 2013).