Menstrual poverty scale: reliability and validity study.

Area of Science:

• Sociology
• Public Health
• Women's Studies

Background:

• Globalizing economies exacerbate poverty, disproportionately affecting women.
• Women face unique monthly expenses, including menstrual hygiene products.
• Lack of access to menstrual hygiene products creates significant challenges for impoverished women.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate a measurement tool for assessing women's menstrual poverty.
• To evaluate the psychometric properties of the Menstrual Poverty Scale.
• To identify key factors contributing to menstrual poverty.

Main Methods:

• Methodological study involving 420 women in Türkiye.
• Scale development based on literature review and expert opinions (CVI = 0.85-0.95).
• Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses using SPSS and AMOS.
• Psychometric evaluation including Cronbach's alpha and item-total correlations.

Main Results:

• The Menstrual Poverty Scale consists of 13 items across four factors: hygiene product access, quality of life, embarrassment, and information/education.
• Exploratory factor analysis revealed item factor loadings from 0.46 to 0.91.
• Confirmatory factor analysis indicated a meaningful model fit (RMSEA = 0.64, CMIN/Df = 1.70).
• Cronbach's alpha was 0.69, with corrected item-total correlations ranging from 0.62 to 0.84.

Conclusions:

• The developed Menstrual Poverty Scale demonstrates acceptable psychometric properties.
• The scale effectively measures dimensions of menstrual poverty, including hygiene access and education.
• Further validation across diverse cultural contexts is recommended.