Attitude Towards Early Marriage Scale (Atems)

Early marriage or child marriage generally refers to the case of being married before the age of 18. Early marriages are described as a woman or man being forced to marry before the age of 18 when they do not feel physiologically or psychologically ready to take on marital or parental responsibilities. The aim of the study is to develop a reliable and valid instrument assessing university students’ attitudes towards early marriage and investigate the instrument’s validity and reliability. The study was conducted with the data collected from 883 students studying at the Faculty of Healthy Sciences, Kırıkkale University. KMO and Bartlett’s Test, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to examine the scale’s validity and the results of the exploratory factor analysis used for construct validity indicated a construct that explained 55.599% of the total variance with factor load values ranging between .356 and .633. The fit indices from the results of the confirmatory factor analysis were calculated as; RMSEA= 0,069; GFI= 0.889; AGFI= 0.869. The scale consists of 23 items collected under 4 factors. These factors are Social Structure, Subjective Judgement, General Judgements and Effects on the Person. Cronbach coefficient for the total of the 23-item scale under four factors was calculated as Cronbach ⍺ = 0.871. In light of the findings, it can be said that the Attitude towards Early Marriage Scale (ATEMS) has high validity and reliability, adequately strong in terms of measuring the items and is a sufficient scale to determine the level of the construct it is expected to measure

Humanities · Gender Studies and Social Issues · Philosophy · Psychology · Turkish Urban and Social Issues