Abstract

The purpose of this study is to develop a scale to measure people's attitudes in love relationships, "Me(My Partner) As a Love Partner Scale" and examine its validity and reliability. Though many scales have been constructed to evaluate elements related to love relationships and attitudes towards love partners, no scales which measure 'what kind of lover I am' directly in love relationships have been made. Thus, this study aimed for a construction of a scale which measures "me(my partner) as a love partner" and a development of MALPS with the method of Semantic Differentials by Osgood et al.(1958). First, from the pool of personality adjectives(N=1780) in Korean language, 106 items were selected, which made the new adjective pool. In the preliminary study, non-personality adjectives, such as demographic, sex and mating related factors, were added to the pool then reduced, and elements that have been studied in the previous studies which developed love-related scales and specialized in love. The new pool of 140 items for attitudes in love relationships was made and administered to 306 subjects, and then 64 items were selected. In the main study, an 'attitude as a lover scale' was administered to 376 subjects, then 6 distinctive factors were identified through factor analysis by principal components method with varimax rotations. The factors were tenderness, familiarity, commitment, competence, permissiveness, and openness, which explain 61% of the total variance. The top 4 pairs of adjectives were selected from each factor, which consist of 24 pairs of adjective scale of MALPS, and as a +1 factor, "satisfied sexually-not satisfied sexually" was added. The range of internal consistency was from .64 to .80. And the correlations of MALPS and its subscales ranged from .48 to .77, and the intercorrelations among factors ranged from .06 to .48. Then a three-week interval test-retest reliability of .81 to .67 was acquired from 107 subjects, indicating that its psychometric properties are at least as good as other widely used scales.