Questionnaire for the Prediction of Judicialized Family Relationships (C-JUDIFA)

Abstract

The Questionnaire for the Prediction of Judicialized Family Relationships (known by its Spanish acronym, C-JUDIFA: Cuestionario de Predicción de la Judicialización de las Relaciones Familiares) is an advanced psychometric instrument engineered to evaluate the risk of chronic post-separation conflict escalating into adversarial litigation within family court systems. Developed by researchers at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, this 59-item self-report questionnaire assesses nine specific psychological and relational dimensions organized into three higher-order structural factors: Breakup Management (incorporating divorce adaptation and pre-/post-separation grief), Post-Conjugal Coparenting (comprising positive coparenting, interpersonal conflict, pathological or entrenched hatred, and forgiveness toward the former partner), and Systemic Relationships (encompassing triangulation dynamics, intrusive involvement of families of origin, and external judicial system influences). Rooted in family systems theory, attachment models, and dispute resolution frameworks, the C-JUDIFA integrates and adapts validated theoretical constructs from prior instruments, such as the Divorce Adjustment Questionnaire (CAD-S) and the Divorce Unresolved Grief Scale. Psychometric evaluation in an adult sample residing in Spain demonstrated robust structural integrity via confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), with single-factor models for each scale exhibiting Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) values below .08 and Comparative Fit Index (CFI) and Goodness of Fit Index (GFI) values exceeding .95. Internal consistency assessed via McDonald’s omega coefficient (ω) revealed high reliability across all subscales, predominantly surpassing .90. The C-JUDIFA serves as an indispensable diagnostic and preventive tool for forensic psychologists, family mediators, social service professionals, and family courts seeking to identify high-conflict trajectories and implement targeted psychoeducational or therapeutic interventions.

Keywords

Breakup Management, Conflict Escalation, Divorce Judicialization, Family Systems, Forensic Assessment, McDonald’s Omega, Parental Coordination, Post-Conjugal Coparenting, Psychometrics, Triangulation, Marital Separation, Confirmatory Factor Analysis.

Authors

The C-JUDIFA was developed by an interdisciplinary team of researchers and clinical/forensic psychologists from the Department of Personality, Evaluation and Psychological Treatment and the Department of Psychobiology and Behavioral Sciences Methodology at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM), Spain:

• María Martín-González: Faculty of Psychology, Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Email: [email protected] (Corresponding Author).
• Sergio Escorial: Faculty of Psychology, Department of Psychobiology and Behavioral Sciences Methodology, Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
• Ignacio Bolaños: Faculty of Psychology, Department of Personality, Evaluation and Psychological Treatment, Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Specialist in family mediation and high-conflict post-divorce dynamics.
• Amelia García-Moltó: Faculty of Psychology, Department of Personality, Evaluation and Psychological Treatment, Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

Purpose

Marital dissolution and relationship dissolution represent major transitional life stressors that necessitate structural, psychological, and relational reorganizations. While the majority of families reorganize functional family boundaries and establish cooperative or parallel coparenting structures over time, an estimated 10% to 20% become entrenched in severe, intractable conflict. This intractable conflict frequently shifts from private interpersonal discourse to the adversarial legal system, generating a phenomenon known in legal psychology and forensic practice as family judicialization. The primary purpose of the Questionnaire for the Prediction of Judicialized Family Relationships (C-JUDIFA) is to identify, operationalize, and quantify the specific individual, dyadic, and systemic vulnerability factors that predispose separated couples to recurrent, adversarial litigation.

From a clinical and forensic perspective, continuous litigation over child custody, visitation schedules, financial support, and parental decision-making exacts a catastrophic emotional and developmental toll on children. It depletes personal and public economic resources, overwhelms court dockets, and paralyzes therapeutic progress. Judicial verdicts, by their inherently adversarial and binary nature, frequently fail to resolve underlying emotional grievances, resulting in chronic relitigation cycles. The C-JUDIFA was constructed to address the critical need for an early-detection screening tool that can differentiate between standard transitional divorce stress and high-risk trajectories destined for court adjudication.

In applied settings, the C-JUDIFA provides substantial utility across multiple domains:

• Family Mediation and Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR): Facilitates the identification of specific cognitive and emotional impasses (e.g., entrenched hatred, unresolved grief) that hinder collaborative dispute resolution, allowing mediators to calibrate their interventions or refer parties to specialized clinical support.
• Parenting Coordination (PC): Equips court-appointed parenting coordinators with objective psychometric profiles detailing parental defensiveness, triangulation tendencies, and coparenting deficits to develop customized child-focused coparenting management plans.
• Forensic Psychological Evaluations: Supplies forensic examiners with empirical data regarding the systemic dynamics of the family unit, differentiating authentic child-centered concerns from systemic weaponization of the judicial apparatus.
• Public Social Services and Family Support Centers: Assists caseworkers and clinicians in deploying targeted psychoeducational programs to mitigate conflict escalation prior to formal court intervention.

Psychological Construct

The C-JUDIFA conceptualizes family judicialization not as an isolated legal action, but as the behavioral endpoint of a complex, multidetermined psychological and relational breakdown. The overarching construct—risk of family judicialization—is operationalized through nine distinct, interdependent dimensions categorized under three structural factors:

Factor I: Breakup Management (Gestión de la Ruptura)

This factor captures the intrapsychic processing and cognitive adaptation of the individual regarding the dissolution of the marital or romantic bond:

• Divorce Adaptation (Adaptación al Divorcio): Evaluates the individual’s subjective capacity to accept the reality of the separation, reconstruct an autonomous life plan, redefine personal identity independent of the former partnership, and tolerate the structural changes inherent in living apart. Deficits in adaptation manifest as obsessive preoccupation with the past marriage and inability to establish personal autonomy.
• Pre-/Post-Separation Grief (Duelo Previo/por la Separación): Measures complicated, ambiguous, or unresolved bereavement processes surrounding the loss of the relationship, shared dreams, and intact family structure. Incomplete grief work often masquerades as anger and vindictiveness, prompting individuals to utilize legal proceedings as an unconscious mechanism to maintain contact with the former partner.

Factor II: Post-Conjugal Coparenting (Coparentalidad Postconyugal)

This factor examines the dyadic interparental relationship, specifically focusing on the differentiation between the terminated marital role and the continuing parental role:

• Positive Coparenting / Parental Coordination (Coparentalidad Positiva): Assesses the presence of functional, cooperative parenting practices, mutual respect for parental competence, clear boundary setting, and proactive communication aimed at safeguarding child welfare. High scores represent a vital protective buffer against judicialization.
• Conflict with the Former Partner (Conflicto con la Expareja): Captures active, direct overt hostility, persistent verbal arguments, disagreements regarding disciplinary approaches, and destructive communication styles that destabilize the post-divorce equilibrium.
• Pathological / Entrenched Hatred (Odio Enquistado hacia la Expareja): Measures a chronic, rigid, and affectively pervasive affective state characterized by deep contempt, vindictiveness, and demonization of the former spouse. Entrenched hatred functions as a primary driver of perpetual legal battle, as destroying the other parent’s standing becomes prioritized over child stability.
• Forgiveness Toward the Former Partner (Perdón hacia la Expareja): Evaluates the conscious release of resentment, vengeance, and bitter emotional debts related to marital infractions (e.g., infidelity, abandonment). Genuine interpersonal forgiveness permits cognitive decathexis from historical wounds.

Factor III: Systemic Relationships (Relaciones Sistémicas)

This factor addresses the broader interpersonal ecology and external systems that maintain, amplify, or redirect familial tension:

• Triangulation Dynamics (Dinámicas Triangulares): Quantifies the extent to which children are inappropriately drawn into parental conflict. This includes cross-generational coalitions, parental alienation tactics, using the child as a messenger or spy, and placing the child in debilitating loyalty conflicts.
• Excessive Involvement of Families of Origin (Influencia / Implicación Excesiva de las Familias de Origen): Assesses boundary diffusion wherein extended family members (e.g., grandparents, siblings, in-laws) interfere in coparenting decisions, fuel interparental hostilities, and validate destructive adversarial narratives.
• Judicial System Involvement / Influence (Influencia del Sistema Judicial): Explores the family’s cognitive representation and instrumental utilization of the legal framework. It captures expectations that court orders will provide moral vindication, punitive retaliation, or boundary enforcement that the parents cannot interpersonally achieve.

Theoretical Framework

The C-JUDIFA synthesizes multiple theoretical paradigms within clinical psychology, developmental psychopathology, and family law to explain the transition from private pain to legal combat:

1. Structural and Bowenian Family Systems Theory

Under Salvador Minuchin’s structural model, a functional divorce requires a renegotiation of boundaries: the spousal subsystem must be dissolved, while the parental subsystem must remain cooperative and semi-permeable. When boundary clarity fails, structural collapse ensues. Complementarily, Murray Bowen’s family systems theory posits that when two-person systems (the ex-spouses) experience heightened anxiety beyond their tolerance, they inevitably triangulate a third entity to dilute tension. In post-divorce pathology, this third entity is either the child (producing alienation and psychological distress) or the legal system itself (producing judicialization). The judicial apparatus becomes an external triangle that institutionalizes and perpetuates systemic homeostasis.

2. Coparenting and Divorce Adjustment Models

The C-JUDIFA draws significantly upon the coparenting frameworks outlined by Mark Feinberg and Constance Ahrons. Ahrons’ seminal typology of post-divorce relationships categorizes couples across a continuum ranging from “Cooperative Colleagues” to “Fiery Foes.” In fiery foe relationships, unresolved marital dynamics infect the coparental arena. The C-JUDIFA builds specifically upon the empirical foundation of the Divorce Adjustment Questionnaire (CAD-S; Yárnoz-Yaben & Comino-González, 2010), recognizing that legal conflict is rarely about external logistical matters (such as schedules or finances) but rather about unintegrated emotional tasks of divorce adjustment.

3. Attachment Theory and Complicated Grief

Rooted in John Bowlby’s attachment theory, divorce represents a severe attachment rupture. When attachment bonds are broken unwillingly or traumatically, individuals may experience intense attachment protest. If this protest is blocked or unresolved, it solidifies into complicated grief. As operationalized in Yárnoz-Yaben’s (2017) Divorce Unresolved Grief Scale, unresolved grief often presents not as sadness, but as rage, boundary violations, and persistent engagement through litigation. Continued court appearances serve an unconscious attachment function: they compel the rejecting partner to interact, thereby preventing final detachment.

4. Models of Conflict Escalation and Therapeutic Jurisprudence

Drawing on Friedrich Glasl’s conflict escalation model and Dean Pruitt’s social-psychological models of dispute, the C-JUDIFA conceptualizes judicialization as an advanced stage of conflict escalation. At higher stages of escalation, goals transition from self-advancement to total mutual destruction, wherein parties willingly accept personal harm provided the other party suffers greater devastation. The theoretical tenets of therapeutic jurisprudence underpin the instrument, emphasizing that legal procedures are social interventions with profound psychological consequences that can either ameliorate or exacerbate psychological trauma.

Validity

The development and validation of the C-JUDIFA followed rigorous psychometric standards designed to ensure robust content, construct, and structural validity.

Content Validity

Content validity was evaluated through a formal panel of expert judges consisting of clinical psychologists, university methodology professors, accredited family mediators, and legal psychologists specializing in high-conflict divorce. Experts reviewed an initial pool of items derived from literature reviews and adapted from validated Spanish instruments, evaluating each item for semantic clarity, relevance to family judicialization, and theoretical alignment with its designated dimension on a 1-to-10 metric.

• The scales “Adjustment to Divorce,” “Parental Coordination,” “Conflict with Ex-Partner,” “Triangulating Dynamics,” “Mourning Before Separation,” and “Judicial System Influence” achieved mean expert endorsement scores hovering near 8.0 out of 10.
• The scales “Forgiveness Toward the Ex-Partner,” “Entrenched Hatred,” and “Influence of Families of Origin” demonstrated exceptional relevance, achieving mean content validity scores approaching 9.0 out of 10.

Qualitative feedback from this expert panel informed item refinement, grammatical simplification, and the elimination of redundant or ambiguous formulations, yielding the final 59-item inventory.

Construct and Structural Validity

Construct validity was corroborated by administering the instrument to a representative sample of adults who had experienced romantic separation or divorce in Spain. Confirmatory factor analytic routines confirmed that the empirical data closely mirrored the multidimensional theoretical architecture. Scale intercorrelations supported convergent and discriminant validity:

• Convergent Validity: High positive correlations were observed between “Conflict with Ex-Partner,” “Entrenched Hatred,” “Triangulating Dynamics,” and “Judicial System Influence.” These scales converged to reflect an underlying, systemic pattern of hostile externalization.
• Discriminant Validity: “Forgiveness Toward the Ex-Partner” and “Positive Coparenting” exhibited marked negative correlations with entrenched hatred and judicial system reliance, evidencing their divergent nature as protective, de-escalating mechanisms.
• Criterion and Known-Groups Validity: Empirical comparisons demonstrated that individuals currently engaged in open court litigation scored significantly higher on Entrenched Hatred, Triangulation, and Judicial Influence, and significantly lower on Divorce Adaptation and Positive Coparenting, relative to parents utilizing out-of-court mediation or informal agreements.

Reliability

The internal consistency of the C-JUDIFA was evaluated using McDonald’s omega coefficient (ω; McDonald, 1999), which is widely recognized as superior to Cronbach’s alpha for multidimensional scales containing items with varying factor loadings and violations of tau-equivalence.

The reliability analyses revealed exceptional internal consistency across the instrument:

• Overall Reliability Profile: The vast majority of the nine subscales yielded McDonald’s omega coefficients exceeding the stringent threshold of .90, demonstrating remarkable homogeneity and measurement precision within each respective theoretical facet.
• Specific Subscale Performance: Scales such as “Entrenched Hatred,” “Forgiveness Toward the Ex-Partner,” and “Divorce Adaptation” displayed omega values comfortably above .90.
• Relative Lowest Coefficient: The “Conflict with the Ex-Partner” scale demonstrated the lowest reliability coefficient among the nine scales; however, it remained well above acceptable psychometric criteria (exceeding commonly accepted standards of .80), indicating solid operational consistency.

The high internal consistency estimates verify that the C-JUDIFA can be deployed safely in high-stakes clinical and forensic evaluations where measurement error must be minimized to avoid biased judicial decision-making.

Factor Analysis

To examine the structural configuration of the 59 items, the authors executed a multi-step analytic strategy combining parallel analysis and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA).

Unidimensionality of the Individual Scales

Prior to validating the overarching higher-order model, each of the nine scales underwent parallel analysis based on minimum rank factor analysis. This parallel analysis empirically demonstrated that each scale satisfied the condition of essential unidimensionality, confirming that each subscale tapped into a distinct psychological facet without internal factor fracturing.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) Fit Indices

Structural equation modeling was applied to evaluate the fit of the unidimensional structure for each of the nine subscales. Using robust estimation techniques to handle ordinal Likert-type responses, goodness-of-fit was benchmarked against the gold-standard criteria established by Hu and Bentler (1999):

• RMSEA (Root Mean Square Error of Approximation): All subscale models yielded RMSEA indices below .08, indicating acceptable to excellent approximation error.
• CFI (Comparative Fit Index): All subscale configurations achieved CFI values exceeding .95, indicating exemplary comparative fit against independent baseline models.
• GFI (Goodness of Fit Index): GFI values consistently exceeded .95 across all scales.

Higher-Order Factor Structure

Subsequent hierarchical factor analyses substantiated the theoretical organization of the nine subscales into three broad, second-order systemic dimensions:

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The C-JUDIFA is an objective, standardized psychological measurement tool designed for self-administration. A summary of its administrative characteristics includes:

• Test Name: Questionnaire for the Prediction of Judicialized Family Relationships (C-JUDIFA; Cuestionario de Predicción de la Judicialización de las Relaciones Familiares).
• Test Type: Original self-report psychometric questionnaire.
• Target Population: Adult individuals (≥ 18 years) with past or ongoing experience in partner relationships, marital separation, or divorce.
• Item Count: 59 items.
• Response Format: 5-point Likert-type scale indicating personal degree of agreement with each statement:
  • 1 = Not in agreement / Strongly disagree (Totalmente en desacuerdo)
  • 2 = Slightly in agreement / Disagree (En desacuerdo)
  • 3 = Moderately in agreement / Neutral (Ni de acuerdo ni en desacuerdo)
  • 4 = Substantially in agreement / Agree (De acuerdo)
  • 5 = Strongly agreeing / Strongly agree (Totalmente de acuerdo)
• Administration Time: Approximately 15 to 25 minutes.
• Administration Modality: Paper-and-pencil or secure computer-based digital questionnaire.
• Scoring and Interpretation:
  • Subscale scores are derived by calculating the mean or sum score of the corresponding items for each of the nine dimensions.
  • Positively keyed protective scales (e.g., Positive Coparenting, Forgiveness, Divorce Adaptation) require reverse coding when aggregating into a single compound “Litigation Risk Index.”
  • High scores on Entrenched Hatred, Conflict, Triangulation, Family of Origin Influence, and Judicial System Influence indicate an elevated risk of recurrent court involvement.
  • Profiles are analyzed dimensionally: elevated systemic and hatred scores combined with suppressed adaptation scores designate maximum litigation vulnerability requiring immediate preventive mediation or parenting coordination.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

• Test Year of Publication: 2023.
• Original Authors: María Martín-González, Sergio Escorial, Ignacio Bolaños, and Amelia García-Moltó.
• Institutional Affiliation: Faculty of Psychology, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain.
• Commercial Status: Non-commercial instrument.
• Fee: Free for non-commercial academic research, public health institutions, and clinical/educational training.
• Permissions and Access: Potential users must contact the corresponding author, María Martín-González (Email: [email protected]), to obtain formal permission and the full standardized test manual and scoring keys. Modifications, commercial distribution, or computerized reproduction on commercial platforms require explicit authorization.

References

• Hu, L. t., & Bentler, P. M. (1999). Cutoff criteria for fit indexes in covariance structure analysis: Conventional criteria versus new alternatives. Structural Equation Modeling: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 6(1), 1–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/10705519909540118
• Martín-González, M., Escorial, S., Bolaños, I., & García-Moltó, A. (2023). Desarrollo y Propiedades Psicométricas del Cuestionario de Predicción de la Judicialización de las Relaciones Familiares (C-JUDIFA) [Development and psychometric properties of the Questionnaire for the Prediction of Judicialized Family Relationships (C-JUDIFA)]. Anuario de Psicología Jurídica, 33(1), 49–55. https://doi.org/10.5093/apj2022a6
• McDonald, R. P. (1999). Test theory: A unified treatment. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.
• Yárnoz-Yaben, S. (2017). El duelo de la separación: Propiedades psicométricas de la Escala de Duelo No Resuelto del Divorcio [Grief of separation: Psychometric properties of the Divorce Unresolved Grief Scale]. Clínica y Salud, 28(2), 59–64. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clysa.2017.02.001
• Yárnoz-Yaben, S., & Comino-González, P. (2010). Un instrumento para la evaluación de la adaptación al divorcio: El Cuestionario de Adaptación al Divorcio-Subjetivo (CAD-S) [An instrument for the assessment of divorce adjustment: The Divorce Adjustment Questionnaire-Subjective (CAD-S)]. Anales de Psicología, 26(2), 273–282. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0214-4840(10)70006-2

Items of the Scale