Development of perceptions and attitudes towards Intimate Partner Violence questionnaire for premarital young adults

OBJECTIVE: The age of young adults is a critical period as they start to explore intimate relationship and prepare for marriage. Although instruments on intimate partner violence (IPV) are available, few include potential predictors of this violent behaviors such as perceptions and attitudes. Therefore, this study aimed to develop a questionnaire to assess perceptions and attitudes toward IPV among premarital young adults.

METHODS: The questionnaire was developed in two stages: item development and scale development. Two forms of validity evidence were applied, which were content validity index (CVI) and face validity index (FVI), to estimate the content validity, response process and internal structure of the tool. This cross-sectional study was conducted among premarital young adults in Kota Bharu, Kelantan. The questionnaire assessed perceptions and attitudes toward IPV on six related components, which were its forms, causes, impacts, supports, acceptance and willingness to disclose.

RESULTS: CVI values for both perceptions and attitudes domains were more than 0.83. Five of the components have few items with low agreement by experts, hence those items were dropped. FVI values for the six domains among premarital young adults were at least 0.83, thus all these items were retained. The final result of development of this questionnaire were 64 items for perceptions and 23 items for attitudes, with five-Likert scale response option.

CONCLUSION: The newly developed tool, named as MYPAIPVQ, is valid based on content validity and face validity to assess perceptions and attitudes toward intimate partner violence among premarital young adults. Before it can be used, further validation studies should be conducted to determine its psychometric properties.