development and psychometric properties of social exclusion questionnaire for iranian divorced women

Background: divorce, especially in women, could be assessed from socio-cultural perspective as well as psychological viewpoint. this assessment requires cultural adopted as well as valid and reliable questionnaire. this study aimed to develop and assess the psychometric properties of a questionnaire in order to address social consequences in iranian divorced women. methods: this was an exploratory mixed method study conducted during 2012 to 2014. according to the grounded theory approach in the first phase, social exclusion was extracted as a core of understanding process in participants. based on, 47 preliminary generated items reliability and validity were assessed. in the second phase, the divorced women were recruited from a safe community center in tehran through convenience sampling. results: exploratory factor analysis conducted on the questionnaires of 150 divorced women with mean age 41.76±8.49 yr, in that, indicated five dimensions, discriminative marital status, economic dependence on marital status, exclusionary marital status, and traumatic marital status health risks and, frightening marital status that jointly accounted for the 64% of the variance observed. an expert panel approved the face and content validity of the developed tool. the cronbach’s alpha coefficient and the intra-class correlation coefficient were found to be 0.70 and 0.85, respectively. conclusion: the present study provided a valid and reliable measure as social exclusion questionnaire in iranian divorced women (seq-idw) to address social post-divorce consequences, which might help to improve women’s social health.