Virtue in marital relationship: Construct and validate the Marital Virtues Scale

The increasing emphasis on the link between ethics and psychology, in the context of marital interactions, has led researcher of this field to concentrate on quantifying ethical constructs.

The current study aimed to assess martial virtues and construct and validate a scale to evaluate these virtues in Iranian families.

The present research was a descriptive-correlational and factor analysis design. The sampling method was convenient which was performed in a number of survey stages on 302 married men and women, pilot implementation on 100 married men and women, and the final implementation on 298 people from five regions of the city of Tehran. Participants completed Hendrick relationship assessment scale (1988), Hills & Argyle (2002) oxford happiness scale-short form, Blom and et al WHO psychological well-being scale (2012), Pines marital burnout scale (1996),  and the researcher-made marital virtue scale (2017).

Results showed that four factors including generosity, tolerance, guarding privacy, and tactics together explained 50% of the total variance. The reliability of each of these factors were 0/85, 0/70, 0/70 and 0/69, respectively. Also, results showed that the scale of marital virtues had an appropriate convergent validity with the constructs of happiness, well-being, and marital satisfaction as well as a favorable divergent validity with marital burnout (p<0/01). Results also showed that women and men had significant differences regarding the virtues of generosity and tolerance.

this scale had an appropriate reliability and validity for use in clinical-counseling and research programs on the couple.