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Rashmi Rani et al., IJSRR 2019, 8(2), 3348-3357
IJSRR, 8(2) April. – June., 2019 Page 3348
Research article Available online www.ijsrr.org ISSN: 2279–0543
International Journal of Scientific Research and Reviews
Standardization and Validation of Hindi Version of Kansas Marital
Satisfaction Scale
Rashmi Rani*, Arun Kumar Jaiswal and Lok Nath Singh
Department of Psychology, Faculty of Social Sciences, Mahatma Gandhi Kashi Vidyapith,
Varanasi – 221002
ABSTRACT
The present study aimed to elucidate the psychometric properties, factorial structure, and
predictive validity of Hindi version of Kansas Marital Satisfaction Scale in Indian cultural milieu. A
total of 300 couples, 21 to 75 years old (300 husbands and 300 wives) were, conveniently sampled
from Chowk and adjoining areas of Varanasi city of Uttar Pradesh, completed the Hindi version of
Kansas Marital Satisfaction Scale. Factor analysis (principal components) with loadings equal to or
more than 0.400, Eigen value equal to 1.00 and the Scree plot revealed single factors explaining a
total of 81.116 % variance for husbands, 77.129 % variance for wives and 78.992 % variance for
couples (husbands and wives). Confirmatory factor revealed that the fit indices were very good (χ2 =
0.00, p < 0.001; CFI = 1.00; GFI = 1.00; SRMR = 0.00; RMR = 0.00) over the level of analysis (for
husbands, wives and whole sample). The reliability coefficients of the single factor emerged fairly
high and indicated good reliability of the Hindi version of KMSS. KMSS correlated significantly and
positively with all measures of DAS-H indicating good convergent validity of KMSS-H. The results
also indicated no significant gender and age differences on marital satisfaction as measured by
KMSS-H. The findings indicated that Kansas Marital satisfaction Scale-Hindi (KMSS-H) may
function as a useful brief measure of marital satisfaction in Indian culture.
KEYWORDS: Marital satisfaction, Marital adjustment, KMSS-Hindi version
*Correspondence author
Dr. Rashmi Rani
Department of Psychology,
Faculty of Social Sciences,
Mahatma Gandhi Kashi Vidyapith,
Varanasi 221002, Uttar Pradesh, India
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INTRODUCTION
Marriage is an emotional and legal commitment of two people to share social bond and
responsibility, emotional and physical intimacy, various tasks, and economic resources. Happy
marriage refers to happiness, satisfaction, affection between spouses in relationship. Marital
satisfaction is a process of adaptation of the both partners in such a way as to avoid or resolve
conflicts sufficiently so that the mates feel satisfied with the marriage and each other. There are
numerous areas of research that focus on the complexities of marriage like the destructive
communication styles, maladjustment, transition to parenthood, work stress, economic stress etc.
Numerous studies on close relationship10,23and interpersonal relationship10,5provide ample
evidences to understand venerability and influential traditions in history like psychodynamic
model24, 34, social-learning models of marital adjustment43, cognitive and effective components1,33,
the dependency of dyadic observation and the dichotomous nature of outcome
variables6,30.Research have revealed that subjective relationship satisfaction is associated with many
optimistic outcomes, including mental health16, physical health48, and child functioning22, while
marital dissatisfaction is associated with numerous issues20 like depressive symptoms2, 3, 14. One of
the etiological models of depression is known as ‘Marital Discord Model of Depression’ which is
connected with marital dissatisfaction4.
In a number of researches several psychological tools were developed in western countries
to assess marital satisfaction. Most universally used scales are Locke-Wallas Marital Adjustment
Test (MAT)28,Spanier’s Dyadic Adjustment Scale (DAS)45,Snyder’s Marital Satisfaction Inventory
(MSI)44,Roach, Frazier and Bowden’s Marital Satisfaction Scale (MSS)37. One of them is
Schumms’s Kansas Marital Satisfaction Scale (KMSS) used to measure marital satisfaction and
adopted in various cultures and populations like Persian34, Chinese43, Korean9 and US Army
personnel populations 39.
From past few decades due to transitional phase of Indian culture and values, increase in rate
of divorce, broken family, marital conflict and their consequences have been observed that
compelled the researchers to assess the marital domains like marital satisfaction and replicate basic
research to examine the cause and consequences of marital satisfaction/dissatisfaction. As such, the
present study aimed to elucidate the (i) psychometric properties, (ii) construct and convergent
validity, (iii) gender and age differences for predictive validity of Hindi version of Kansas Marital
Satisfaction Scale in Indian cultural milieu in view of the fact that psychological test(s) of proven
psychometric adequacy for a given population, if transported and employed for measurement
purposes of the theoretical construct(s) in another cultural milieu, may not be regarded as
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trustworthy and valid measure of the theoretical construct(s) unless preliminary psychometric checks
are made13, 49.
Experimental Section
Participants and procedure
A total of 600 married participants, 21 to 75 years old, (300 husbands + 300 wives)
(husbands, mean age = 39.507, SD = 9.190 years; wives, mean age = 35.587, SD = 8.580 years) with
at least graduation qualification were conveniently sampled from Chowk and adjoining areas of
Varanasi city of Uttar Pradesh. The analyses of the demographic characteristics revealed that length
of the marriage ranged from 2 to 47 years (mean marital length = 11.920; SD = 9.295), and 91.3%
and 8.7% Participants were respectively from urban and rural background, and 76.7% and 23.3% of
participants were respectively from joint and nuclear families. The husbands were having a little
higher educational qualification with 25.3% and 24.6% husbands were respectively graduate and
postgraduate as compared to 21.3% and 28.7% graduate and postgraduate wives.
Instruments
Kansas Marital Satisfaction Scale- Hindi Version
Schumm et al., (1986) devised a three-item inventory impressively entitled as Kansas Marital
Satisfaction Scale (KMSS)41. Participants are asked to rate their satisfaction, with their marriage,
with their spouses and with their relationship. The inventory has been shown to possess a reliability
of 0.93, only 0.01 below that of Spanier's questionnaire, and to correlate 0.83 with KMSS41,
depicting that short questionnaire is of high face validity (surprisingly well in the field so far
available). With prior permission of Prof. Walter Schumm the Hindi translation of KMSS was
created using a back-translation procedure involving one well-versed and native speaker of both the
languages and the authors) in an attempt to ensure the content equivalence. In addition, the items
were evaluated for their relevance of the measurement of the theoretical construct(s) in Indian
cultural milieu. In the final attempt, the items were tried out on a small sample of married couples
and their suggestions were evaluated and incorporated in the final version of the questionnaire.
Dyadic Adjustment Scale- Hindi version (DAS-H)36
The DAS45 is a standardized assessment of couple’s relationship. The DAS consists of 32
items which yields scores on four subscales: (i) Dyadic Consensus (ii) Dyadic cohesion (iii) Dyadic
satisfaction and (iv) affectional expression.DAS has good reliability and construct validity. Spanier
(1976) reported fairly high Cranach’s alpha coefficients ranging from 0.73 to 0.96, DAS correlated
fairly high with (r = 0.86) with Locke-Wallace Marital Adjustment Scale). Most researchers,
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reasonably enough, simply sum the four scales for discrimination purposes of distressed and non-
distressed couples.
Statistical Analyses
The SPSS-version 20 was used to compute descriptive statistics, correlation analyses, and
internal consistency. Pearson´s correlation was used to investigate the relationships between Dyadic
Adjustment Scale (DAS) and other measures. AMOS version 20 was used to perform confirmatory
factor analysis (CFA) using the maximum likelihood (ML) method. Analyses included (i) factor
analysis, (ii) average item total coefficients of correlations,(ii) reliability indices (split-half reliability
coefficients corrected by Spearman–Brown prophecy formula and Cranach’s alpha coefficients), (iii)
relationships between the factors, and (iv) construct, convergent and predictive validity of the test
scores by confirmatory factor analysis and highlighting gender and age differences on the factors of
KMSS.
RESULTS
The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy was found to be 0.732 for husbands,
0.727 for wives and 0.729 for the whole sample, and Bartlett’s test of sphericity was significant(Chi
square = 497.854, df= 3, p < 0.001 for husbands, Chi square = 390.805,df= 3, p<0.001 for wives and
Chi square = 879.544, df= 3, p < 0.001 for whole).Factor analysis (principal components) on Hindi
version of KMSS with the loading equal to or more than 0.400, Eigen value equal to 1.00 and the
Scree plot revealed single factors explaining a total of 81.116 % variance for husband, 77.129%
variance for wives and 78.992 % variance for whole sample. The reliability coefficients of the
KMSS for husbands (Split half = 0.874, Cronbach’s alpha = 0.884, Guttman lambda = 0.884), for
wives(Split half = 0.844, Cronbach’s alpha = 0.850, Guttman lambda = 0.851) and for the whole
sample (Split half = 0.857, Cronbach’s alpha = 0.867, Guttman lambda = 0.868) emerged fairly high.
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Measures of Internal consistency
The item-total coefficient and average item-total coefficients of KMSS-Hfor husbands, for
wives and for the whole sample were found to be fairly high.
Table
-
2: Mean ± SD values for KMSS
-
H and indices of internal consistency and reliability for
husbands, for wives and for the whole sample (N= 600)
Items Husbands Wives Whole sample
Item total coefficients
1 0.887 0.86 0.873
2 0.925 0.894 0.910
3 0.890 0.880 0.883
Averageitem-total coefficients
Mean ± SD
Cronbach’s
Split-half
Guttman lambda
0.901 0.878 0.889
3.187
±
2.377
13.18
±
2.351
13.183
±
2.362
0.884 0.85 0.867
0.874 0.844 0.857
0.884 0.851 0.868
Construct Validity
Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was used to evaluate the construct validity. We
hypothesized that the KMSS-H would consist of single factor. The obtained Chi-square test of
overall model fit was significant for husbands (χ2 (df = 00, N = 300) = 000, p <0.001), for wives (χ2
(df = 00, N = 300) = 000, p <0.001) and for the whole sample (χ2 (df = 00, N = 600) = 000, p
<0.001). The obtained results indicated that the fit indices were fairly good (CFI = 1.00; GFI = 1.00;
SRMR = 0.000; RMR = 000) over the level of analysis (for husbands, wives and whole sample) and
structure equation model indicated perfect model fit (Figure-2).. It is recommended that RMR and
SRMR should be ≤ .05 and other indexes (e.g., CFI, and GFI) should be ≥ .90 for a consistent
model6,19,26, 42. As a result, factor structure of the Hindi form of the KMSS has perfect model fit
indices and findings confirmed the construct validity of KMSS-H. The items of KMSS-H and item
loadings in component matrix are given in Table -1.
Convergent validity
Previous results have indicated that the Kansas marital satisfaction scale significantly
positively correlate with the sub factors of Dyadic Adjustment Scale (DAS)45. It was hypothesized
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that marital satisfaction would positively correlate with the sub-factors of marital adjustment.
Consistent with the hypothesis, marital satisfaction correlated significantly and positively with sub-
factors of Hindi version of Dyadic Adjustment Scale (DC, DS and DCH)and total score of DAS-H,
and these observations support the convergent validity of KMSS-H.
Table – 3: Relationships between KMSS-H and sub-factors of DAS-H
PMCEQ-H measures
KMSS
Dyadic Consensus 0.407**
Dyadic Cohesion 0.379**
Dyadic Satisfaction 0.260**
DAS-H Total 0.448**
N
600
** indicates p < 0.01.
Gender Differences
One-way analysis of variance was used to determine the gender differences on marital
satisfaction with ‘gender’ as independent variable and KMSS-H total scores as dependent variable..
Results revealed no significant gender effect on KMSS-H (F (1,598) = 0.001, p > 0.05). Results
suggested that husbands (Mean = 13.187; SD = 2.377, N = 300) and wives (Mean = 13.180; SD =
2.351, N = 300)(p > 0.05) to be more or less equal on marital satisfaction.
Age differences
To elucidate the age effects on marital satisfaction one-way ANOVA was performed on the
scores of KMSS-H with age as independent variable. The spouses were divided into two age groups:
participants falling below mean age of the sample were designated as younger participants (37 years
and below) and those falling above mean age of the sample were designated as older participants (38
years and above). The analyses yielded insignificant age effects (F(1, 598) = 0.893, p> 0.05) on
marital satisfaction. Younger spouses (Mean = 13.107; SD = 2.479, N = 354)and older spouses
(Mean = 13.293; SD = 2.182, N 246) (p > 0.05) displayed almost similar levels of marital
satisfaction.
DISCUSSION
The study demonstrated robust reliability and high internal consistency indices for KMSS-H
in a sample of Indian married men and women separately as well as for couples and the findings are
consistent with previous studies17, 21, 32, 39. Confirmatory factor analysis revealed that the Hindi
version of the KMSS has good model fit indices consonant with previous research on factor
structure9, 34, 40.
Convergent validity was assessed by correlating the KMSS-H with the sub-factors of Dyadic
Adjustment Scale (DAS-H). The Kansas Marital Satisfaction Scale and sub-factors (DC, DS and
DCH) and DAS-H positively correlated, confirming convergent validity of the instrument, which
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corroborate with previous studies8, 9. Taken together these results support the contention that marital
satisfaction may play an important role in stability in relationship, reduce the degree of interpersonal
tension and better wellbeing. The present results also indicated no significant gender differences on
KMSS-H, however, previous reports have both evidenced significant gender11, 18,25and non-
significant gender effects12, 15, 31, 34, 50. Similarly reports are also on record with age effect on marital
satisfaction with some studies reporting significant age effects27, 29and others reporting non-
significant age effects34, 38. Overall it can be concluded that the KMSS-H may function as a useful
brief measure of marital satisfaction in Indian culture.
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