Development of Culturally-specific Family Criticism Scale and Emotional Over-involvement Scale

The current study was conducted to develop the indigenous scales of family criticism and emotional over involvement in Pakistani community in the context of expressed emotion theory. To generate items for the scales, four focus groups were conducted with students, housewives, class II, and class IV workers. To establish the psychometric properties, these scales were administered to a sample of 500 participants belonging to different socio-economic status, professions, residential areas, and both genders. Exploratory Factor Analysis generated two factors for Perceived Criticism Scale namely Cultural and Religious Aspects of Criticism and Gender Related Criticism and three factors of Emotional Over-involvement Scale namely Self Sacrificing Behavior, Overprotective Behavior, and Cultural Conceptualization of Emotional Over-involvement. Reliability and factor analyses of both scales indicated that these scales are reliable and valid to measure family criticism and emotional over-involvement in social interactions of Pakistani families.