Measuring couple relationship quality in a rural African population:

Available data suggest that individual and family well-being are linked to the quality of women's and men's couple relationships, but few tools exist to assess couple relationship functioning in low- and middle-income countries. In response to this gap, CRS developed a Couple Functionality Assessment Tool (CFAT) to capture valid and reliable data on various domains of relationship quality. We carried out a validation study of the tool among 401 married and cohabiting adults (203 women and 198 men) in rural Chikhwawa District, Malawi. We used exploratory factor analysis to assess scale performance of each domain and produce a shortened Relationship Quality Index (RQI) composed of items from five relationship quality domains. This article reports the performance of the RQI.