Domestic violence has received a great deal of concerns in Thailand recently. There is no known measurement for the attitudes towards domestic violence for Thai society so far, to our best knowledge. There is an urgent need of a valid and reliable assessment on attitudes towards domestic violence for Thai government agencies who are in charge of preventing and decreasing the events of domestic violence.
Objective: The purpose of this study is to develop a Thai version of the Attitudes towards Domestic Violence Scale (ADVS) for Thai government employees in order to assess the level of their attitude.
Participants: In total, 284 government employees (Mage=45.67, SDage=7.69; 82 females, 202 males) voluntarily participated in this study.
Methods: Back-translation and experts reviews were conducted to obtain content validity. Factor analysis was applied to establish construct validity, items analysis and test-retest reliability were analyzed to obtain internal consistency and reliability.
Results: The ADVS shows an adequate model (KMO=.855, Bartlett test χ2=2244.608, p=.000) with belief (cognitive), awareness (affective), and willingness (behavioral) dimensions which match the theory of attitudes. The three dimensions have good to high internal reliability (Cronbach’s α: .641~.866) and test-retest reliability (r=.896~.987).
Conclusion: The ADVS may serve as an effective measurement for Thai policy makers, government agencies and researchers for domestic violence prevention in Thailand. Directions for future studies and limitation of current study are discussed.
Keywords: Domestic violence, Attitudes, Government employee, Thailand
