The Chinese version of the Kansas Marital Satisfaction Scale: Some psychometric and normative data

The Chinese version of the Kansas Marital Satisfaction Scale (C-KMS) was administered to 381 parents of preschool mentally handicapped children, along with other instruments assessing their stress, mental health, coping styles and caregiving patterns. The C-KMS was found to have high internal consistency as a scale (alpha = .92) and tentative support for the validity of the scale was established: C-KMS scores correlated significantly with the frequency of seeking help from spouse, and subjects who had to take care of the child alone at different times had significantly lower C-KMS scores than subjects whose care-giving demands were shared by their spouse. The data also showed that the mean C-KMS scores in the present sample were lower than those reported in the literature and females reported a significantly lower level of perceived marital satisfaction than males.