A Closeness to Divorce Scale for wives of alcoholics

A 15-item Guttman scale, Closeness to Divorce, was developed to describe and quantify how close an alcoholic's wife is to divorce at a given point in time. A detailed precoded interview schedule guided extensive interviews with 60 women, varying in marital status, who were current or former wives of men treated of alcoholism in Veterans Administration Hospitals. The interview contained 24 items on various aspects of marital stability gathered from the literature and from pilot interviews. These items were factor analysed and 15 items, loading 0.40 or better on the first principal component, were chosen for further analysis. A Guttman scale computer program was used to arrange the 15 items to form a Closeness to Divorce Scale, i.e. a unidimensional, cumulative scale with divorce at the endpoint and sequential psychological, interpersonal, geographic and legal steps toward divorce as the other items. Preliminary evidence of construct validity, potential clinical and research uses for scale, its limitations, and suggestions for future studies are described.