Hi Florin,

For Social Supports, one of the best I know of is the Interpersonal Social Evaluation List by Sheldon Cohen. It has four scales and good reliability and validity. I have used it to examine whether income interacts with various types of social supports differently and how the combination of income and social supports predicts physiological measures across time.

There are numerous Life Events Scales. You should ask what age group you are using because some LEs make no sense for older adults (pregnancy, birth of childhood) and others make less sense for younger adults (going into a nursing home). You may want to read classic papers by Tom Holmes or Dorhenwend. There are other good relatively recent papers by Thoits that discuss when and where LEs are most related to psych distress.

The two most used coping measures I know of are the COPE by Carver and Scheirer and versions of the Ways of Coping Checklist by Folkman or by Vitaliano (this began with scales for problem-focused coping, wishful thinking, avoidance, self-blame and seeking social supports, but later scales were added for counting one's blessings, having faith, and blaming others).. If you google them you will find numerous refs. Be careful about having two many scales and capitalizing on chance in your analyses. I am assuming you are looking for process coping and not more trait like coping. Also pls consider the fact that the appraisal of the event is just as important as the coping. If they do not match, then you should see higher levels of distress.

Take care and good luck.

Planning a research on psychological stress in perinatal period I found this interesting and helpful article. I think it could be useful for your purpose too.

How to measure prenatal stress? A systematic review of psychometric instruments to assess psychosocial stress during pregnancy.

Nast I, Bolten M, Meinlschmidt G, Hellhammer DH.

Paediatr Perinat Epidemiol. 2013 Jul;27(4):313-22.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ppe.12051/epdf

Best wishes for your study!

Dear Peter,

Thanks for your wonderful feedback. I think we can only afford to use brief versions, so for social support the short form of the ISEL seems ideal. As for the coping measure, your measure looks an excellent and widely-used tool, but the 66 items makes it too long I'm afraid. Is there a validated abbreviated version that we could use? Alternatively, I see there's a brief COPE available. For life events, I'm going to look into it. Again, many thanks for your very useful and comprehensive input and good luck with your work! Florin

Dear Laura, thanks for your input. For stress we're using the EPDS, state STAI and a pregnancy specific anxiety scale. Best, Florin.

Dear Florin thank you for your feedback. As you can see in the paper are indicated also 5 possible instruments to assess life events in pregnancy. I found the Holmes-Rahe Life Stress Inventory free to use.

http://www.stress.org/holmes-rahe-stress-inventory/

For social support, I'd suggest the SSQ short form, I have attached the papers and if you have difficulty getting the scale, I have it. For coping, I too would recommend the COPE, or perhaps the CERQ. With the CERQ you just have to fill in a form and request the use of it for a specific study and then they let you use it for free.

Many thanks, Sue - I decided for the Interpersonal Social Evaluation List and the brief COPE.