Abstract

Marriage is an important institution that provides social support for effective human functioning. However, the same institution has been threatened by series of conflicts from all angles in Nigeria. In a bid to address the problem of conflict in marriage, there is need for an effective indigenous instrument that would identify and measure the problem. Therefore, the present study was aimed at developing and validating Marital Conflict Inventory (MCI). The study adopted both qualitative and quantitative research designs which were divided into two parts with part one using Focused groups discussions (FGDs), Key Informant Interviews (KIIs) and Depth Interviews (IDIs) for item generation based on three broad themes of communication, sexual satisfaction and third-party interference. Part two utilised a structured instrument for data gathering. Part one purposively selected 21 participants who were all married, or had been married, while part two sampled a total number of 490 participants all in Lagos State. Adopting a principal component analysis (PAF) with varimax rotation for factor analysis, the 25 items generated were adequate for factor analysis with KMO criterion of 0.907 and Barlett's test of sphericity ( 2 (300) = 7443.170, p < .01). After extraction, the result showed that the items loaded on 4 factors with a total variance of 41.97%. Internal validity showed that all the seven factors correlated significantly with each other and all the factors reports good alpha coefficient ranging from .67 - .92. Convergent and concurrent validities showed that the new scale correlated significantly with existing related scales as indicated - marital conflict scale (r = 0.015), Relationship Qualities Scale (third party interference) (r = 0.756), Index of Sexual Satisfaction (ISS) (sexual satisfaction) (r = -0.219) and Communication Pattern Questionnaire CPQ-SF (communication) (-0.028). The MCI is a promising psychometric instrument that can be used as a whole or with the subscales after proper categorisation and labelling for screening for, and research on, marital conflict and other family issues.

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