Dyadic Emotional Safety & Inclusion (DESI-18 v6.0): Community Overview

DESI-18 (Dyadic Emotional Safety & Inclusion) is an 18-item partner-referent self-report instrument measuring the quality of dyadic encounters across four dimensions: Engagement, Responsiveness, Rapport, and We-ness. This community overview is designed for practitioners, programme managers, and researchers working with buddy schemes, peer mentoring, social prescribing, befriending programmes, or any brief structured dyadic encounter intervention. The instrument uses a 180-degree partner-rated design — each person rates the other — enabling dyadic statistical methods (APIM, ICC) unavailable to single-rater tools. It takes 4–5 minutes per rater and is available in English, Dutch, and French. DESI-18 v6.0 was developed from the FRIEND trial (de Blauwe, UEL 2026; preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/n54j9_v1), a pre-registered feasibility RCT examining Non-Violent Communication primers in zero-history dyads (AsPredicted #265934; Ethics UEL/2026/AGAF). The six-factor SIT-anchored architecture was proposed by Prof. Clifford Stevenson (NTU). This work is supported by the NIHR Three Schools Mental Health Programme (Scholar Award £10,900) and is conducted within an MRes Psychological Research Methods programme at Nottingham Trent University. A multi-site psychometric validation study (Study A: N=400, 9 sites, UK + Belgium) is planned for October 2026 – April 2027 with OSF pre-registration to be locked September 2026. Scoring syntax (R), Qualtrics survey links, and the full researcher manual are openly available on OSF (osf.io/4c28b, public 15 June 2026). Cite the FRIEND preprint (doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/n54j9_v1) when using DESI-14/18.