Effect of Marital Stress on Married Nurses: A Stockholm's Marital Stress Scale Approach

Abstract

Marital stress is something that is tearing many homes apart, marital status is not easy to assess not only because of the divergent view on marital stress but also due to dearth of validated and culture fair assessment tool in Nigeria. The Stockholm's marital stress scale is a 17 item questionnaire, a Likert format of three response categories. The study reported a Cronbach alpha of .77 with no validity information. The purpose of this study is to validate the Stockholm's Marital Stress Scale (SMSS) on Nigerian married nurses. This instrument is foreign, the authors validation was about twenty (20) years ago and it has not been validated for Nigerian population. These justify the need for re-validation of the scale. Also, this validation is on a specific occupation group (nurses) which the original author did not capture. 180 nurses in Federal Medical Centre Keffi, Nigeria, participated in the study and a survey method was employed in this study. Items 9 and 17 of the original instrument loaded very low and not bench marked and were deleted, the Cronbach alpha for the new version is 863 and the norm is 34.76. Nurses that score above the norm have high marital stress while those that score below the norm have low marital stress. The Stockholms Marital Stress Scale (SMSS) correlates significantly with marital stress inventory (MSI), (rxy (180 = .734, p< .001) and the items- total correlation ranges from .265 (p< .01) - .764 (p< .001). Authors conclude that the SMSS provide a brief, valid and reliable measure of marital stress among Nigerian nurses.