Measuring Attitudes About Intimate Partner Violence Against Women: The ATT-IPV Scale

Abstract

In lower-income settings, women more often than men justify intimate partner violence (IPV). Yet, the role of measurement invariance across gender is unstudied. We developed the ATT-IPV scale to measure attitudes about physical violence against wives in 1,055 married men and women ages 18–50 in My Hao district, Vietnam. Across 10 items about transgressions of the wife, women more often than men agreed that a man had good reason to hit his wife (3 % to 92 %; 0 % to 67 %). In random split-half samples, one-factor exploratory factor analysis (EFA) (N1 = 527) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) (N2 = 528) models for nine items with sufficient variability had significant loadings (0.575–0.883; 0.502–0.897) and good fit (RMSEA = 0.068, 0.048; CFI = 0.951, 0.978, TLI = 0.935, 0.970). Three items had significant uniform differential item functioning (DIF) by gender, and adjustment for DIF revealed that measurement noninvariance was partially masking men’s lower propensity than women to justify IPV. A CFA model for the six items without DIF had excellent fit (RMSEA = 0.019, CFI = 0.994, TLI = 0.991) and an attitudinal gender gap similar to the DIF-adjusted nine-item model, suggesting that the six-item scale reliably measures attitudes about IPV across gender. Researchers should validate the scale in urban Vietnam and elsewhere and decompose DIF-adjusted gender attitudinal gaps.

Violence in childhood, attitudes about partner violence, and partner violence perpetration among men in Vietnam

“…The attitudinal questions on IPV against wives neither capture degrees of justification nor contextualized the situations by portraying the wife as “at fault” or “not at fault” [38]. Still, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of the 10 attitudinal items showed that the 6 retained items reflected well a unidimensional construct [34]. Validation of this scale in urban Vietnam and elsewhere is warranted.…”

“…For attitudes about IPV against women, we created a 0–6 summative scale from 6 of the 10 attitudinal items (3,4,5,6,8,9) that we confirmed using factor analysis to be reliable indicators of a unidimensional construct [34]. The 0–6 and 0–10 scales were highly correlated (Pearson’s r=0.96).…”

Women’s empowerment in Egypt: the reliability of a complex construct

“…Several intrinsic measures like attitudes towards gender norms and tolerance of IPV are also commonly used as measures of women's empowerment globally, 8,30,31 and in Egypt specifically. 13,17,28,[32][33][34] Attitudes towards gender norms is a scale comprised of questions about whether or not women believe women should do certain things, like employment, and be treated the same as men, like equal pay. Acceptance of IPV is a series of questions about under what circumstances a woman thinks IPV is acceptable.…”

Underreporting of Gender-Based Violence in Kerala, India: An Application of the List Randomization Method

“…For Mexico, Liu and Fullerton (2015) find that higher female social statusmeasured by educational, economic, and political standings-is associated with lower rates of homicide 8 of women and lower intimate partner violence rates (Liu and Fullerton, 2015). Attitudes towards gender violence vary across countries, and in Vietnam a greater share of women justify domestic violence against them than do men (Yount et al, 2014a). Women in rural Minya, Arab Republic of Egypt, who are exposed to intimate partner violence may escalate their housework to satisfy local customs of feminine domesticity, while at the same time substituting economic activities for non-spousal care work to enhance their economic independence from violent partners (Yount et al, 2014b).…”