Preliminary Development and Psychometric Evaluation of the ACL Scale: Factor Structure, Measurement Invariance, Reliability, and Validity

Abstract

Humans have evolved such that social connectedness (i.e., interpersonal closeness, belongingness) plays an integral role in the health, happiness, and survival of our species. Intimacy has been the target of much research over the past few decades in the effort to gain a more nuanced, behavioral understanding of social connectedness and, in particular, points amenable to intervention. Despite the importance of this pursuit, however, few self-report measures exist that capture theoretically and empirically grounded aspects of intimacy, and those that do exist have important shortcomings that limit their utility in research. The purpose of this study was to create a self report measure of intimacy that has a strong theoretical and empirical foundation, is applicable to a broad population of individuals across a broad range of contexts, is useful in a clinical setting, and is situated in the behavioral psychological tradition. The authors report on the development and preliminary psychometric evaluation of the ACL Scale, a 20-item, 4-factor self-report measure of intimacy based on Reis and Shaver’s (1988) model. Factor structure, measurement invariance, internal and test-retest reliability, and validity of the measure are discussed.