Developing a measure of contentment in an Arab Muslim country: implications for cross-cultural research in social work

This is one in a series of papers that report on a programme of research focusing on the psychosocial consequences of Kuwaitis in the wake of the 1990 invasion and occupation by Iraq. The research team chose to focus on contentment as the obverse of trauma effects and develop a new measure that more closely represents Kuwait society due to cultural sensitivity. The paper briefly discusses the programme of research and the need for a new measure of Kuwaiti contentment. The Kuwaiti Raha Scale (KRS), was developed to serve as the primary dependent variable for a post-war national survey of mental health in Kuwait. The KRS emerged from a multi-method approach first administered to a convenience sample of 560 undergraduate university students enrolled in eight different classes. The results reported here note that no differences were found according to the variable of gender, as was expected. Four factors emerged, with Cronbach's Alphas ranging from 0.850 to 0.709 after eliminating three items. The total twenty-eight-item KRS measure yielded a Cronbach's Alpha of 0.906. Conclusions: The present findings suggest that the four subscales are a psychometrically sound measure of contentment, and would be useful in studies of Arabic-speaking cultures by social workers, and other investigators, concerned about culture-based well-being. Implications for European social professions are discussed.