Fear of romantic commitment in young people: Design and psychometric evidence.

Abstract

Increasingly, young people are opting for short- or medium-term cohabitation, avoiding more permanent sentimental commitments, such as marriage. This study aimed to design a scale to measure the fear of emotional commitment, with evidence of content and construct validity, and reliability through internal consistency, using an instrumental study methodology. The opinions of 503 young between 18 and 40 years of age, single with or without a romantic relationship, chosen by convenience, were collected. To determine content-based validity, a review by seven expert judges was selected to evaluate the quality of the items in terms of clarity, relevance and representativeness; to find evidence of construct validity, the opinions collected from young by AFE and AFC were subjected to analysis with a WLSMV estimator and polychoric matrices, and Cronbach's Alpha and McDonald's Omega coefficients were used to analyze the reliability of the test. The results showed that 100% of the items proved to be valid (Low > 0.5) under a liberal criterion. In addition, the AFE yielded a KMO of 0.937, indicating a seven-factor solution, while the AFC suggests a six-factor solution with 22 items (CFI = 0.992, TLI = 0.990, RMSEA = 0.068, SRMR = 0.053), which offers a better structure. Reliability analyses yielded ω values ranging from 0.549 to 0.866 and α values ranging from 0.448 to 0.866 between factors. These findings confirm Skinner's and Sternberg's theory and represent a significant advance