Abstract
The Kinship Scale was designed to measure the construct of psychological kinship. A revised version of the scale was validated against several measures of intimacy and relatedness. Subjects were undergraduate psychology students (56 men, 144 women) who were administered test packets including the Revised Kinship Scale, the Rubin Love and Liking Scales, the Adolescent Parent Relations Scale (Attachment), and the Revised UCLA Loneliness Scale. The scales (except for Loneliness) were taken relative to two different cognitive sets, Closest Parent and Boyfriend or Girlfriend. As predicted, psychological kinship was positively correlated with attachment, love, and liking; however, sex differences complicated the picture. The prediction of a negative correlation between Kinship and Loneliness was not supported. Factor analysis yielded four factors, accounting for 51% of the total variance. The strongest factor (“family love”) contained 10 of the 20 items on the Revised Kinship Scale and accounted for 37 7% of the variance. It correlated as highly with the external affiliative measures as did the revised scale, and so may be a good short form of the test.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.