Psychology ETDs

Publication Date

Summer 7-2022

Abstract

The study of relationship intimacy and attachment has gained increasingly greater attention within the field. As such, researchers have developed numerous self-report measures of relationship intimacy and attachment. However, a majority of such measures have been developed and validated with White, Western populations, which calls into question the validity of such measures when used with minority populations. One way to establish validity of measures is to test for measurement invariance; namely, that the measures assess the same constructs across groups. The focus of this study was to test the measurement invariance of two commonly used measures of relationship intimacy, the Fear of Intimacy Scale (FIS) and the Personal Assessment of Intimacy in Relationships Inventory (PAIR), as well as two measures of adult romantic attachment, the Adult Attachment Scale (AAS) and the Adult Attachment Questionnaire (AAQ), across Hispanic and non-Hispanic White college women. This study surveyed 444 college women from a southwestern U.S. University, who completed measures of relationship intimacy and adult romantic attachment. Results revealed that confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) provided poor model fit and failed to replicate pre-established factor structures of the measures. Consequently, exploratory structural equation models (ESEM) were used to further analyze study data. Results indicated the ESEM provided better fit to the data for all measures than conventional CFA models, suggesting that additional work may be warranted to further examine the theoretical underpinnings of these measures. Moreover, all measures (FIS, PAIR, AAS, AAQ) demonstrated scalar invariance across Hispanic and non-Hispanic White college women, suggesting that such measures assess similar constructs in these groups.

Degree Name

Psychology

Level of Degree

Doctoral

Department Name

Psychology

First Committee Member (Chair)

Elizabeth Yeater

Second Committee Member

Katie Witkiewicz

Third Committee Member

Steven Verney

Fourth Committee Member

Joanne Davila

Language

English

Keywords

Romantic relationships, attachment, intimacy, measurement invariance, culture

Document Type

Dissertation

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