Background: The involvement of in-laws in abusing females directly or provoking the spouse to subject his wife with abuse is very common and has short and long term implications on worsening a woman’s physical, psychological and emotional wellbeing. There was no tool available to assess in-laws abuse among females.

Objective: To develop the questionnaire for in-laws abuse and validate it among women of local population

Materials and Methods: This study was done in three stages (I) development of tool (II) validation of tool using Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and (III) Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) for confirmation and finalization of the tool. A total of 125 females with mean age of 26.4±2.1 years were included for EFA. The Face and content validity of the designed tool was ensured. Principal Component Analysis with Varimax rotation method was used for item reduction. Initially 25 items were included in the study against four factors which was reduced to 22 items after EFA. For CFA, data from 250 women were taken and analyzed for pathway analysis, the Comparative Fit Index (CFI), Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) and other indices using PLS software. P-value ≤ 0.05 was considered significant.

Results: After elimination of three items, a tool with 22 items was developed and found to be reliable to assess in-laws abuse. It encompassed four factors named Fear, verbal, control and physical abuse. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy (KMO) was 0.913 and Bartlett’s test of Sphericity was statistically significant for the finalized questionnaire (p-value=0.000). The mean age of total 250 females included in CFA was 30.644±6.05 years. The pathway analysis and several model fit indices showed satisfactory alignment of all 22 items demonstrating that questionnaire was confirmed to be valid to assess the level of abuse by in laws.The tool was also reliable overall Chronbach Alpha=0.962) as well as in individual factors (Chronbach Alpha=0.925, 0.918, 0.901 and 0.887).

CONCLUSION: This study concludes that the developed questionnaire is a reliable and valid tool for assessment of abuse by in laws on females.

Keywords: Validation, reliability, exploratory factor analysis, domestic abuse, in-laws abuse, violence