Development and Psychometric Properties of the Aurat March Scale

Background: In a country having traditional values like Pakistan, due to social media and the rise of modernization, there is an increased socio-political awareness among people. There is an increase in human rights movements, and socio-political and feminist movement like Aurat March is becoming quite popular. However, there is a substantial divide in the general population with reference to the recent feminist movement labeled as the “Aurat March”. Such a divide has given rise to various views regarding this movement that is often in conflict with each other. Aims: The current article reports the development of The Aurat March scale. Method: Exploratory Factor Analysis was carried out on a sample of 400 men to establish the factor structure of the newly developed scale. Findings: Five factors were extracted based upon the scree plot as per criteria of Eigenvalue> 1. Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) test of sphericity was done. The value of 0.911 indicates that the sampling facility was superb, whereas Bartlett’s test of sphericity is found as significant. Factor loadings that were less than 0.3 were suppressed by SPSS. The final 30 items with α = .87 are considered as good alpha reliability. The newly developed Aurat March significantly correlated with the Attitude towards Women Scale (Spence et al., 1973); which indicates its convergent validity. Conclusion: The newly developed Aurat March scale is one of the pioneering efforts to develop a scale aiming to measure men’s attitudes and perceptions regarding Aurat March. The scale has demonstrated sound psychometric properties and is intended for use with the general population of men all over Pakistan.