Revision and Validation of the Mother-Love Absence Scale

The mother's love is vital for adolescent development, yet there is a lack of specific tools to measure its psychological absence. This study aimed to develop the Mother-Love Absence Scale (MLAS) by revising the Father-Love Absence Scale (FLAS) and verify its reliability and validity among adolescents. Study 1 included 2700 junior and senior high school adolescents. The junior and senior high school samples were each randomly split into two subsamples. One subsample was used for Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), while the other was used for Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), internal consistency reliability tests, and cross-gender measurement invariance tests. The results indicated that the factor structure of the MLAS was consistent with that of the FLAS, both comprising four factors: emotional absence, cognitive absence, behavioral absence, and volitional absence. Furthermore, multi-group confirmatory factor analysis verified the gender invariance of the scale. In Study 2, 193 adolescents were surveyed to conduct a CFA and a criterion-related validity analysis. The results of the CFA again demonstrated a good model fit for the four-factor structure. The criterion-related validity analysis indicated that the mother-love absence was negatively connected with parent-child interaction and positively correlated with parental phubbing. Therefore, the revised MLAS has well reliability and validity and can be a reliable instrument for measuring mother-love absence in adolescents.