DEVELOPMENT OF ECONOMIC ABUSE SCALE (EAS); ESTABLISHING CONTENT VALIDITY OF EAS

Abstract

Economic abuse involves behaviors that control a woman’s ability to acquire, use, and maintain economic resources, thus threatening her economic security and potential for self-sufficiency (Adams, Sullivan, Bybee, & Greeson, 2008). Woman battering is a prevalent social problem committed against millions of women each year. Battering involves psychological abuse, physical abuse, and economic abuse as well. Economic abuse is the area which is less focused as compared to other forms of battering. The objective of present study was to develop an indigenous scale that would explore the phenomenon of economic abuse faced by married Pakistani women as currently there is no such indigenously developed measure of economic abuse available in Pakistan. Present study was conducted in two phases. In the first phase, a pool of items was generated. In phase two, Content Validity for EAS was established. The Scale CVI was 0.93. All 41 items were retained and were transformed into a 5-point rating scale. The psychometric properties of scale will be established using factorial validity.