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Soc Indic Res (2013) 113:197212
DOI 10.1007/s11205-012-0089-6
Huiping Zhang Xiaohe Xu Sandra K. M. Tsang
Accepted: 21 May 2012 / Published online: 2 June 2012 The Author(s) 2012. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com
Abstract Since the inception of the economic reform, marital relationship in urban China has undergone dramatic transformations. Though the burgeoning body of scholarly research has demonstrated that marital quality has increasingly become an important aspect of family life among married persons in urban China, both the conceptualization and measurement of marital quality remain underdeveloped. The purpose of this pilot study is to develop and validate a comprehensive and culturally appropriate marital quality scale, namely the Chinese Marital Quality Scale (CMQS). Results from the conrmatory factor analysis (CFA) conducted on a sample of 387 married persons from Beijing indicate that the CMQS can be conceptualized as a two-factorial and multidimensional construct, encompassing marital happiness, marital interaction, marital disagreement, marital problem, and marital instability. Additional statistical analyses also indicate that the CMQS has exhibited satisfactory reliability and concurrent validity. It is thus concluded that the CMQS is a reliable and valid instrument to measure marital quality in contemporary Beijing and possibly in other Chinese cities.
Keywords Martial quality Chinese Marital Quality Scale Chinese marriage
Urban China
H. Zhang
Department of Social Work, The School of Sociology and Population Studies, Renmin University of China, No. 59, Zhongguancun Street, Haidian District, Beijing, Peoples Republic of China e-mail: [email protected]
X. Xu
Department of Sociology, University of Texas at San Antonio, One UTSA Circle, San Antonio, TX 78249-0655, USAe-mail: [email protected]
S. K. M. Tsang (&)
Department of Social Work and Social Administration, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Konge-mail: [email protected]
Conceptualizing and Validating Marital Quality in Beijing: A Pilot Study
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198 H. Zhang et al.
1 Introduction
The landscape of urban Chinese marital relationships has undergone rapid transformations over the past six decades and marital quality has become the main indicator to measure quality of life and marital relationship in contemporary urban China (Xu 1996; Cheng et al. 2005). In traditional China, marriage was customarily viewed as an affair of two families and should be parentally arranged (Lang 1946; Xu and Whyte 1990). Under the guidance of Confucian family ethics, conjugal...