Development of a codependency scale: Factor structure of a revised form

Abstract

Starting from the 16 item SpannFischer Codependency Scale (Fischer et al., 1991), the present study expands the SpannFischer questionnaire to a 30 item one that comprises a larger and more recent view on the concept of codependency. Then, after checking its reliability and validity, and also after reading the inter-item correlation matrix, there were excluded items that correlated either too weakly or too strongly with each other. The new resulting scale is a 6 – point Likert one with 14 items, its alpha Cronbach is 0.859 and its corrected Spearman–Brown coefficient 0.824, showing that the instrument has sufficient internal consistency for both research and diagnosis. Following the exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, it was found that the described variance ratio is 44.27% and that the scale is bidimensional. “Both the relating to others” factor and “the inner processes” one have 7 items each. For diagnosis purposes there have been determined a low, an average and a high level of codependency.