Measuring Social Connection: Social Innovation Research Institute's Social Connection Measurement (SIRI-SCM) Toolkit

Social connection is a latent and multidimensional construct. Although defined in various ways depending on different goals and multi-disciplinary research approaches, a consensus has emerged that social connection cannot be quantified or directly observed through a single measure or experience. Certainly, there are existing measurements related to social connection and dimensions of it however, many of these measurements are context-specific, inconsistently applied, focused on only one aspect of social connection, or are seen as problematic for translation to practice.
As such, while “positive social connections can bolster social well-being and may protect against a wide range of health risks” , both academics and industry lack a consistent, conceptually relevant, and methodologically robust tool that can be applied to assess the multiple dimensions of social connection and understand the relationship of social connection with outcome measures. As a response, the SIRI-SCM toolkit provides an overview of social connection and describes a process of measurement development based on multiple data collections from 2021 to 2024 with nationally representative Australian population samples.