Validating the Concord Index as a measure of family relationships in China

Abstract

Interest in family functioning across cultures has become more widespread, but our instruments have not kept pace by measuring constructs that are especially relevant outside the West. We present the psychometric properties of the Concord Index (CI) in the family context. The CI examines (qihe), translated most closely into English as concord. The term includes concepts of harmony and mutuality, and is a characteristic of dyadic relationships valued in Chinese cultural groups that form about a fifth of the world's population. The scale was adapted to measure 2 types of family relationships: specific dyadic relationships within the family between any individual family member and another (the A-P perspective), as well as an individual's composite assessment of all his/her family relationships (the A-FAM perspective). The 10-item measure was internally consistent, stable over 2 weeks, and showed factor invariance across gender, age, relationship, and household size for A-P and A-FAM perspectives. The A-P correlated negatively with disagreement with the partner. The A-FAM correlated with measures of family functioning, well-being, leisure time spent with family members, and with measures of emotional but not physical symptoms. Furthermore, the A-FAM measure added predictive power to individual measures of emotional functioning in assessing subjective happiness. The CI adds to other "imported" instruments designed to measure family function in Chinese populations because of its brevity, its adaptability for measuring dyadic and global family relationships across family roles, its easily understood items, and its incremental validity in predicting well-being beyond individually focused measures.