Designing and Assessing the Validity of Mate-Selection Criterion according to Islam

The present paper, which is concerned with designing and examining the validity of a questionnaire on mate-selection according to Islam, seeks to assess mate-selection criteria used by those who want to marry. Mate-selection criteria have been extracted from the Quranic verses and traditions and they were used to prepare two questionnaires: one with 95 items for boys and another with122 items for girls, two samples; one comprising 337 male and the other comprising 424 female students from the seminary and universities in Qom and Isfahan, were completed.The research findings show that the mate-selection criterion proposed by Islam has desirable intrinsic consistency and correlation based on split-half method. The results of the prescriptive factor analysis show that these two questionnaires have eight factors as follows. The factors included in the questionnaire for male students are: religious commitment, piety-orientation, luxury, quiescence, lack of self-control, egoism, familism, and love declaration. The factors stated in the questionnaire for male students are: religious commitment, attention to appearance, egoism, inflexibility, courtesy, attention to religious appearance, relaxation, and independence-seeking. The evaluation shows that this questionnaire contains essential correlated factors for assessing mate-selection indexes and features and it enjoys desirable reliability and validity.