Recommended Instruments for Analyzing Cyber Dating Violence: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Cyber dating violence is an emerging form of dating violence that may have serious health effects on adolescents and young people, and in recent years interest in its study has increased. In order to understand completely the nature and magnitude of the problem, a clear understanding of the concept, constructs and well-established measurement tools are needed. The goal of this study was to analyze the measurement instruments of cyber dating violence in adolescents and young adults, and to determine which are the best suitable to use. To accomplish these objectives a systematic review was carried out. After reviewing the literature, twenty-four measurement instruments were analyzed, with important differences found between them in terms, constructs, dimensions and measurement attributes, as well as differences in their assessed psychometric properties. Once the methodological quality evaluation of the instruments was carried out following COSMIN (COnsensus based Standards for the selection of health Measurement Instruments) guidelines, three scales were found to be recommendable depending on the age and cultural context of participants: Cyber Dating Abuse Questionnaire (Borrajo, Gámez-Guadix, Pereda, et al., 2015), Technology-facilitated Abuse in Relationships Scale (Brown & Hegarty, 2021), and Abuse in Teen Relationships (CARPA; Calvete et al., 2021).

Cyber Dating Abuse: Conceptualization and Meta-analysis of Prevalence Rates

“…Those studies included in the review that used the best-valued and most commonly used instrument (Martínez-Soto & Ibabe, 2022) were considered for presentation of their victimization prevalence data, given that the majority of studies did not report perpetration rates. Thus, to carry out the meta-analysis, only the studies (n = 16) that used the Cyber Dating Abuse Questionnaire (Borrajo, Gámez-Guadix, Pereda, et al, 2015) were considered.…”

“…The second objective was to analyze victimization prevalence rates based on the findings of those studies using the most suitable and most commonly used instrument for CDA measurement (Martínez-Soto & Ibabe, 2022), and to synthesize, through a meta-analysis, the prevalence rates of CDA taking into account dimensions and gender.…”

“…A meta-analysis of 16 studies, involving 14,235 participants, was also conducted in order to examine the frequency of cyber dating abuse victimization in adolescents and youth, based on the most used instrument, the CDAQ (Borrajo, Gámez-Guadix, Pereda, et al, 2015), also considered a promising tool (Martínez-Soto & Ibabe, 2022). To our knowledge, the current review was the first to explore the victimization prevalence of adolescents and youth CDA, including studies using the same measurement instrument, in an attempt to provide a comprehensive picture of the occurrence of this phenomenon.…”

“…A previous review (Rocha-Silva, 2021) had already described terms, definitions and dimensions, but no proposals were made. A further strength is that all studies included in the meta-analysis were carried out with the same questionnaire (Cyber Dating Abuse Questionnaire; Borrajo, Gámez-Guadix, Pereda, et al, 2015), an instrument that has shown positive and good-quality evidence in its psychometric properties (Martínez-Soto & Ibabe, 2022).…”

Exploring Social Norms and Control Coercive on Intimate Partner Violence in the Young. Implications for Prevention

“…Then, CC is a concept that is sometimes applied to a set of psychological violence aimed at coercion (Stark, 2007), but that, at other times, is used as a specific type of psychological violence (Cantera et al, 2009;Delgado 2010Delgado , 2014. CC has been applied, too, as a typical behavior base of cyber-violence (Martínez-Soto & Ibabe, 2022;Zweig et al, 2014), but in contrast, we think this is a form of perpetration, and not a different type of violence. In this work, we use CC defined as a set of tactics designed to regulate the behavior of another person, restricting the personal freedom so as to achieve a certain outcome for the benefit of the exerciser (agent), but which does not necessarily result in conflict and need not be perceived or defined as violent by the recipient; it can extend to severe forms of deprivation and exploitation (Crossman & Hardesty, 2018;Stark, 2007).…”