Summary
The Social Psychiatry Research Unit at the Australian National University has developed an interview procedure for assessing for research purposes the current state of a person's social relationships — the Interview Schedule for Social Interaction (ISSI). The present paper sketches the origin of the instrument and describes its format and content. The instrument has been used in a sample survey of Canberra, Australia. Data from this survey forms the basis for an analysis of the structure of social interaction. The scoring of data from the interview schedule is discussed, and scores for the answer categories of each question are derived using multivariate analysis of contingencies (MAC). In Part 2 of the paper we shall present tests of hypotheses about the structure of social relationships, using confirmatory factor analysis. The Interview Schedule for Social Interaction, and this analysis based upon it, are believed to constitute the first attempt to give a detailed, ordered and structured account of the field of social relationships, based on representative, large-sample, standardised data collection.
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Duncan-Jones, P. The structure of social relationships: Analysis of a survey instrument. Soc Psychiatry 16, 55–61 (1981). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00582688
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00582688