Measuring social support within partnerships: Proposal for a short survey instrument

Abstract

In this technical report, we propose a short survey instrument for measurement of social support within partnerships with a particular focus on received and provided emotional and instrumental support in different work-related situations. The paper begins with a brief summary of our scientific motivation and highlights some important gaps in existing research. We then present a set of new survey questions. We suggest integration of our survey instrument in the Socio-economic Panel (SOEP) or the German Family Panel (pairfam) and establish some research areas of interest to researchers who come from a variety of disciplines.