A Quantitative Study Of College Students’ Love Attitudes With The Hendrick’s Las In Lu’an City, Anhui Province

Love as the eternal topic of literature now has become a focus of academicstudies at home and abroad. Scholars explore the nature of love not only because of itsmysterious charm but also because it is the link which binds people together as wellas the fundamental stones of our social harmony and development. Young people,specifically the college students referred to in this study, are starting to experienceinscrutable love as an inevitable part of the life.This paper aims at finding out the love attitudes of college students in the city ofLu’an in Anhui Province with the Love Attitude Scale (LAS)-Short Form developedby the Hendricks in1998(Clyde Hendrick, Hendrick,&Dicke,1998). This scale wasestablished on the Canadian Sociologist Lee’s “Color Theory of Love”, whichdescribes six styles of love, embracing Eros (passionate love), Ludus (game-like love),Mania (possessive love), Storge (friendship-love), Pragma (logical love), and Agape(selfless love).This study tries to explore whether the six styles of love presented in the scale isapplicable among Chinese college students on their love attitudes, and to see whetherthere are any group differences, including Gender comparisons, Grade comparisons,Major comparisons, Love Status comparisons, Only-Child-or-Not comparisons.After the regimen of translation and back-translation to design the Chineseversion of the LAS-Short Form, the author distributed the questionnaires to more than200students, collected them and primarily focused on the quantitative methodologies,including scale-reliability, subscale-reliability, item-reliability, validity, confirmatoryfactor analysis, and One-way ANOVA, and so on. The data analyses illustrate thatonly5subscales are applicable to the Chinese college students.“Ludus” was finallydeleted since it had very low reliability and validity.The ANOVA shows that males are significantly more erotic, ludic and agapic thanfemales; sophomores are more erotic, agapic and storgic than junior students; students majoring in natural sciences are more ludic and agapic than those majoring arts;students who are currently in love are more concerned about Eros while students whohave never been in love are more concerned about a friendship-like relationship; andthere are no significant differences of the six love styles existing between theOnly-Child students and the not-Only-Child students. Further more, because Ludushas very low reliability and validity, its results are questioned.This study is a preliminary research which explores the love attitudes with astrictly structured model introduced from abroad. The new perspective and local datawould hopefully inspire the domestic studies to establish a more Chinese andlocalized theory of love.