Social Safety Questionnaire: Development and Validation of a Psychometric Scale Assessing Social Safety and Social Threat.

Social Safety Theory posits that perceptions of social safety and social threat shape human health and behavior, yet no instrument exists for assessing these constructs. To address this gap, we developed and validated the 20-item Social Safety Questionnaire (SSQ) in a community sample of 503 adults (preregistration: osf.io/qaeh3). Four factors were identified: social rejection, social support, social acceptance, and interpersonal trust. As expected, social safety positively related to perceived social support (r=.75) and social safeness (r=.81), and negatively to loneliness (r=-.53), psychological distress (r=-.64), and everyday discrimination (r=-.51). Additionally, the SSQ alone explained 41.4% of the variability in psychological distress; even after controlling for age, gender, race/ethnicity, and subjective socioeconomic status, SSQ predicted lower distress (standardized β=-.60,p<.001). The SSQ is thus a concise, theoretically sound, and psychometrically robust instrument for assessing social safety and threat in research and, potentially, in clinical settings for case conceptualization, treatment planning, and patient monitoring.