Psychometric properties of the Conflict Management Styles Scale in family and friendship contexts for university students

Introduction: The style of coping with interpersonal conflicts significantly influences the consolidation or deterioration of friendships and family relationships. Therefore, it is essential to have instruments with adequate psychometric evidence to evaluate this coping style. Objective: This study aims to develop the Conflict Management Styles Scale (EMCO) for friendship and family contexts and to determine its validity based on content, construct, reliability, and equivalence through metric invariance across genders. Method: An instrumental study was conducted with 493 university students aged 18 to 43 years (M = 21, SD = 2.9), comprising 67.7% women and 32.3% men. A review by expert judges was performed, followed by exploratory factor analysis (EFA) with oblique rotation for both subscales and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) using the WLSMV method with standard and robust indices. Internal consistency and metric invariance across genders were also assessed. Results: Regarding content validity, all initial items demonstrated adequate validity. In the EFA, both subscales yielded a five-factor solution, consistent with the CFA results. In the latter analysis, the "family" subscale achieved fit indices of CFI = 0.977, TLI = 0.975, SRMR = 0.064, and RMSEA = 0.061 [90% CI 0.056–0.065], while the "friends" subscale obtained CFI = 0.964, TLI = 0.962, SRMR = 0.072, and RMSEA = 0.068 [90% CI 0.065–0.072]. In terms of reliability, the "family" subscale showed ω = 0.856 and α = 0.845, and the "friends" subscale obtained ω = 0.879 and α = 0.877. Additionally, structural equivalence between men and women was demonstrated through metric invariance. Conclusion: The EMCO scale is concluded to present adequate evidence of content validity, construct validity, and reliability for assessing conflict management styles in university students.