Development and Validation of a Questionnaire for Emotional Divorce Measurement: A Mixed Research on Family Mental Health Context

Background objectives: Emotional divorce, seems to be a reducing factor in the quality of marital life and mental health. This study aimed to design, construct and validate an emotional divorce instrument. Materials Methods: This study was an applied, psychometric survey using a multi-stage sampling method conducted on 805 women living in Iran between 2015 to 2018. After determining the items in a semi-structured qualitative study, face, content, structure, and concurrent validity as well as the split-half and Cronbach’s alpha coefficient methods for reliability evaluation were used. For all analyses, the SPSS19 software (IBM Corp, 2013) and for confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) LISREL 8.8 was used. Results: 36.81% of the total variance was justified by 63 factors with Eigenvalues of less than 1 and 63.19% by the first 12 factors with an Eigenvalue of higher than 1. The final questionnaire consisted of 66 questions. The total Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was 0.979. The exploratory factor analysis (EFA) resulted in five factors consisting of “love and interest in the spouse”, “attention to the needs and practice the tasks”, “controversy and misbehavior”, “mental health”, and “respect and appreciation”. The results of the CFA confirmed model derived from the EFA (Chi-Square=7653.70, df =2503, P-value= 0.0000, RMSEA = 0.051). Conclusion: The reliability of this questionnaire was high in two consecutive evaluations. The structural validity also led to the identification of the desired number of items. Hence, this questionnaire seems to be an appropriate tool for assessing emotional divorce as a feature of quality of marital life. However, further investigation is needed for tool efficiency assessment in different communities.