The construction of a scale to measure the attitudes of young adults toward divorce

It was the purpose of this study to attempt to develop a psychometrically adequate scale to measure the attitudes of young adults toward divorce. Young, unmarried adults were chosen so that attitudes about divorce could also be viewed as a measure of premarital beliefs. A 45-item Divorce Attitude Scale was constructed using the Likert format. The scale and a brief demographic information sheet were administered to 331 undergraduate students in the Spring of 1987 at The University of Tennessee-Knoxville. A principal components analysis was used to estimate the initial construct validity of the scale. An oblique solution extracted three factors which accounted for 37% of the total variance. Because nearly three-fourths of the 37% was accounted for by Factor I, Factors II and III were not interpreted.

The factor that emerged was labeled the Marriage Preservation Scale because the content of the items which loaded strongest on the factor suggested an attitude that favored marriage and its preservation in the face of circumstances that would threaten its dissolution. The mean factor loading for the 12 items on Factor I was .54. Initial estimates of reliability using Cronbach's alpha generated a mean item-to-total-scale correlation of .50 and an overall scale reliability of .85. Although these estimates appear promising, caution is advised in their interpretation because further work is needed on the validation of the structural cohesiveness of the scale. Recommendations for further work on the scale suggest that items be written more specifically to reflect a given context. The construction of a reliable and valid instrument for measuring attitude toward divorce could be beneficial for use in research on the impact of divorce on societal mores, as well as for use in the counseling of members of divorcing families.