Measuring Intimate Partner Violence: A Multi-Study Investigation of Gender Patterns

Introduction: Gender patterns in intimate partner violence (IPV) remain a controversial topic.  Most behavioral self-report measures produce gender "parity" in rates of perpetration and victimization of IPV.  However, not all survey methods produce gender parity.  For example, the National Violence Against Women Survey (NVAWS) and the National Criminal Victimization Survey use self-report methodologies which produce more reports of male than female perpetration.  Arrests, reports to law enforcement (regardless of whether they lead to arrest), homicide data, and helpseeking data also produce more reports of male than female perpetration.  Reports by witnesses (usually other family members) also produce more reports of male than female perpetration, as seen in the National Survey of Children's Exposure to Violence (Hamby et al., 2011) and the original National Family Violence Survey (Straus, 1992).  This methodological inconsistency is still poorly understood.  This paper will present the findings from three studies.

Method and Results: In Study 1, 238 undergraduates were randomly assigned either the standard version of the CTS2 physical assault victimization items or a version similar to that used in NVAWS, which changed the partner-specific wording to generic wording ("Someone" instead of "My partner"), with perpetrator information collected instead as a follow-up question.   A significant Form X Gender interaction was found, indicating that the non-specific version yielded higher rates of female than male victimization.  Study 2 compared standard CTS2 items to two alternative phrasings and again found a Form X Gender interaction in a sample of 288 undergraduates.  Study 3 implemented one of these alternative forms in a rural community sample of 1000 adolescents and adults (ages 12 to 45) and found that female victimization reports were significantly higher than male victimization reports, for the full scale and for every item. 

Conclusions:  These studies, taken together, show that the wording of self-report items has a large impact on observed gender patterns.  There should be consistency across methodologies in the measurement of any phenomenon.  These studies show that it is possible to develop self-report IPV measures that correspond to other data on intimate partner violence.