Urdu Translation of the California Inventory for Family Assessment for Use in Pakistan

INTRODUCTIONIn Pakistan, as in many other developing countries, there is little availability of reliable and valid scales measuring constructs related to marriage and family relations. Unavailability of such measures has two detrimental effects. First, it limits research on these topics within the Pakistani context, thus constraining efforts to learn more about processes in Pakistani families. Second, well-studied and standardized measures can play a role in counseling, for example helping counselors to clarify the nature of clients' relationship problems and therefore helping them to suggest effective interventions. Greater availability of marital and family measures thus could improve Pakistani counselors' effectives in working with married couples and with families. Epidemiological research in Pakistan has found marital problems to be among the risk factors for developing Common Mental Disorders (Ali, Saud, Mohammad, Lobo, Midhet, 1993). Similarly, Ali, Asad, Mogren, and Krantz (2011) found high rates of harmful inter-spouse behavior in a Pakistani sample. Such findings imply the need for more extensive research on the psychology of couples and families in Pakistan, which would be facilitated by availability of reliable and valid measures.The way forward to fill the gap is to either develop indigenous scales, a process which would require considerable time, funding and expertise, orto translate and adapt measures that have been developed and validated in other linguistic or cultural contexts. The present report describes the process of translating one such measure, the California Inventory for Family Assessment (Wemer & Green, 1999-2008; Wemer, Green, Greenberg, Browne & McKenna, 2001), and also presents results obtained with a sample of couples in pilot testing.Measures of Marital and Family Relations in PakistanGiven the cross-cultural prevalence of marriage and family, even if we acknowledge the diversity of constructions of these institutions and enacted practices related to them around the world it is likely that its underlying concepts overlap across many cultures. In this context, translating Western scales and adapting them is an efficient way to fill the research gap in marriage and family relations in developing countries such as Pakistan. Although many scales measuring constructs related to marriage and family relations have been successfully translated and validated and are extensively used in different languages (ReigFerrer, Cepeda-Benito, Snyder, 2004), our review of the literature suggests that only a small number of such measures have been translated into Urdu for use in Pakistan and studied there. Rehman and Holtzworth-Munroe (2007) developed an Urdu translation of the widely used Short Marital Adjustment Test (SMAT; Locke & Wallace, 1959), a measure of marital satisfaction. These authors found that wives' and husbands' reports of marital satisfaction were highly positively correlated, thus suggesting validity in the assessment of marital satisfaction at a general level. Additionally, scores on the SMAT were found to correlate expectably with scores representing couple communication, as coded from couples' discussions. Also measuring aspects of marital quality, Kausar and Saghir (2010) used an Urdu translation of the Dyadic Adjustment Scale (Spanier, 1976), and found its scores to be positively correlated with a measure of post-traumatic growth among female Pakistani oncology patients and their spouses.Malik and Rohner (2012) developed Urdu translations of two versions of Rohner's Acceptance/Rejection-Control questionnaires, one by which spouses describe their behavior toward each other (Rohner, 2005a), and one by which children describe their parents' behavior toward them (Rohner, 2005b). It was concluded that Acceptance/Rejection scores had sufficient reliability for further analyses in the Pakistani sample, but that Control scores did not. When children's reports of parents' Acceptance/Rejection were analyzed in relation to parents' reports of these same behaviors toward one-another, a number of statistically significant associations were obtained. …