Norms for the attitude toward marital exclusivity scale using three procedures in married individuals in Monterrey, Mexico
Keywords:
norming, attitude, marital infidelity, sex, social desirabilityAbstract
In 1987, Weis and Fenton developed the Attitude Toward Marital Exclusivity Scale (ATMES). In 2020, Moral validated this scale in a sample of married couples residing in Monterrey, Mexico. The distribution of ATMES scores deviated from normality, exhibiting positive skewness and slight leptokurtosis; therefore, the scale was normed using deciles. The aim of the present study was to develop additional ATMES norming procedures to assess the potential effect of social desirability on scale scores: sten scores and the ten Golden-Ratio Statistical Transformation Scores (GRiSTEN), implemented using an R script. The study also sought to develop sex-specific norms and compare the three norming procedures: the previously employed decile method and the two procedures proposed in the present study. A non-experimental cross-sectional study was conducted. A questionnaire comprising eight scales, including the ATMES, was administered to a sample of 727 married Mexican adults (52.8 % women and 47.2 % men) selected through randomroute sampling in a previous study conducted in 2015. Because differences in central tendency were observed between women and men, separate norms were developed for each sex. The association between attitudes toward infidelity and social desirability was small and similar across sexes; therefore, no adjustment for social desirability was required in the norming process. The three norming procedures showed very high ordinal correspondence and produced highly similar participant classifications. GRiSTEN scores constituted an appropriate alternative for norming markedly skewed distributions, as they virtually preserved participants' rank ordering while providing a transformation more consistent with the empirical distribution of the data.
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