The reliability and validity of the Marital Attitude Scale in unmarried college students and community residents

Objective:To translate and revise the Marital Attitude Scale(MAS),and explore its' reliability and validity in China.Methods:To well know about the opinions of interviewees on the MAS adequately,pilot study was conducted among 76 college students.Secondly,the MAS was administrated to 626 college students and 249 community residents,and 201 college students were re-tested after 10 days randomly.Then the items were selected by t test,coefficient,Cronbach' s α and factor analysis.Finally,the reliability and validity of the revised MAS were analyzed.Results:Three items of MAS were deleted after item analysis and a new scale including 20 items were constructed.The Cronbach' s α coefficient of the MAS was 0.738 and the test-retest reliability was 0.893.Confirmative factor analysis showed that the construction of the new scale fit the original construction of MAS,there were two factors:the general concepts regarding marriage,and the feelings regarding their own present or possibly future.Conclusion:The Chinese version of MAS shows good reliability and validity,and meets the needs of psychometric properties.It may be used in research of attitudes toward marriage in the social cultural context of China.