Eliah Reding

Date of Award

January 2019

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Counseling Psychology & Community Services

First Advisor

Rachel Navarro

Abstract

This dissertation examines the existing friendship maintenance literature to develop a psychometrically sound scale for the measurement of friendship maintenance among gay men. Existing friendship maintenance research does not adequately capture the uniqueness of gay male friendship. Utilizing DeVellis’s (2016) steps of scale development, this dissertation constructs a new scale, the GayFABS, to assess the unique aspects of friendship maintenance in gay men. Unique in this dissertation is the use of a focus group to establish content validity rather than the traditional approach of expert review. An exploratory factor analysis is conducted to structure the scale and its component subscales. Then initial reliability and validity examinations are conducted. The results of the study show that the scale has appropriate reliability and shows adequate convergent and divergent validity with three other scales: the Friendship Maintenance Scale; the Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Positive Identity Measure; and the Life Orientation Test – Revised (Oswald, Clark, & Kelly, 2004; Riggle et al., 2014; Scheier, Carver & Bridges, 1994). The initial results provide evidence of a potentially psychometrically sound measure for gay male friendship maintenance which will need to be further supported by a confirmatory factor analysis in the future.

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