Validation of the ‘Revised Dyadic Adjustment Scale (RDAS)’ for Measuring Marital Relationship among Oromo Language Speaking Ethiopian Families at Burayu Town, Central Ethiopia
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Background: While research in marital adjustment continues, developing family measures that fit into different socio-cultural contexts appears to be minimally pursued. This calls for customization of measures used elsewhere in the world and check its appropriateness.
Objective: Widely used marital adjustment measure (Revised Dyadic Marital Adjustment Scale, RDAS) with three subscales (Consensus, Cohesion, and Satisfaction) was validated against Oromo language speaking communities living in Burayu town.
Materials and Methods: The data used in this study were generated from 201 randomly selected participants living in marital relationships for over a year. The validation measure, RDAS, was used to collect data along with the two anchor scales; Satisfaction with family life scale (SFLS) and conflict subscale of brief family relationship scale (BFRS). Beforehand, bilingual experts were translated the English version of RDAS and SFLS to the Oromo language and backward to English to ensure content similarity and harmony in meanings between the two versions. Descriptive statistics, factor analysis, and Pearson product moment correlation coefficients were used for data analysis.
Results: An acceptable overall reliability index of RDAS (α = 0.799 ) was obtained. Factor analysis verified the presence of three components of RDAS. However, one item from RDAS Cohesion subscale was reduced because of low factor loading. RDAS convergent validity and discriminant validity were ensured with observed significant correlation indices between overall RDAS and SFLS score, and very low negative correlation between RDAS and conflict subscale of BFRS, respectively. The findings confirm the model fitness to the sample data with all satisfactory goodness of fit indices.
Conclusion: it is concluded that acceptable overall reliability coefficient of Cronbach’s alpha 0.799 and ensured construct validity of the scale justifies its appropriateness to use for the intended purpose. The results imply that the three-dimensional RDAS has had reliable and valid psychometric properties based on the data obtained from Oromo language speaking Ethiopian married couples.
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