article · Archives of Sexual Behavior
Sternberg's 45-item Triangular Love Scale measures intimacy, passion, and commitment, but most studies utilise diverse shortened forms, hampering comparability across research. To address this, a standardised short version, the TLS-15, was created containing 15 items evaluated on five-point scales rather than the original nine-point format. The scale was established and refined through re-analysis of multinational data from over 7,000 individuals, followed by tests confirming its three-factor structure, reliability, convergent validity, and test-retest stability in smaller cohorts. A global cross-cultural study involving over 60,000 participants evaluated 37 linguistic versions spanning every continent. The findings demonstrate robust reliability, validity, and cross-cultural measurement invariance. Consequently, the tool can serve as a dependable measure of love components, assessing intimacy, passion, and commitment either individually or combined within a unified three-factor structure across diverse linguistic and cultural populations.
Love influences human bonding and partner selection globally, yet inconsistent measurement tools have restricted comparison across scientific studies. Validating a concise 15-item questionnaire across 37 languages establishes a dependable, internationally comparable baseline for relationship research. This allows researchers to reliably evaluate romantic experiences across diverse cultures while significantly reducing participant response burdens.
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Love is a phenomenon that occurs across the world and affects many aspects of human life, including the choice of, and process of bonding with, a romantic partner. Thus, developing a reliable and valid measure of love experiences is crucial. One of the most popular tools to quantify love is Sternberg's 45-item Triangular Love Scale (TLS-45), which measures three love components: intimacy, passion, and commitment. However, our literature review reveals that most studies (64%) use a broad variety of shortened versions of the TLS-45. Here, aiming to achieve scientific consensus and improve the reliability, comparability, and generalizability of results across studies, we developed a short version of the scale-the TLS-15-comprised of 15 items with 5-point, rather than 9-point, response scales. In Study 1 (N = 7,332), we re-analyzed secondary data from a large-scale multinational study that validated the original TLS-45 to establish whether the scale could be truncated. In Study 2 (N = 307), we provided evidence for the three-factor structure of the TLS-15 and its reliability. Study 3 (N = 413) confirmed convergent validity and test-retest stability of the TLS-15. Study 4 (N = 60,311) presented a large-scale validation across 37 linguistic versions of the TLS-15 on a cross-cultural sample spanning every continent of the globe. The overall results provide support for the reliability, validity, and cross-cultural invariance of the TLS-15, which can be used as a measure of love components-either separately or jointly as a three-factor measure.
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DOI: 10.1007/s10508-023-02702-7
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