Do partners agree about abuse in their relationship?: A psychometric evaluation of interpartner agreement.

Abstract

This study tested whether partners can be relied on to provide congruent reports about abuse in their relationship. The authors examined whether interpartner agreement (IA) varies as a function of whether the perpetrator is the man or the woman, and by whether the abusive behavior being reported is physical or psychological. Guided by psychometric test theory, the authors examined whether weak IA about specific behaviors can be improved by aggregating behavior items into scales and by controlling for random measurement error. A representative sample of 360 young couples was studied.IA did not vary with the perpetrator's gender or with the nature of the abusive behaviors, but victims (both men and women) reported somewhat more abuse than did their perpetrators. IA about specific abusive behaviors was only poor to fair, but it became very good when items were aggregated into scales and even better when measurement errors were removed from the reports. The findings suggest that reports of abuse can be aggregated to form internally consistent scales that show strong IA, thereby fulfilling criteria for reliability. Moreover, under research conditions that guarantee confidentiality, either abuser reports or victim reports are suitable methods for use in research on partner abuse.Partner abuse-whether between married, cohabiting, or dating couples-is a serious social problem. The consequences of partner abuse have been recognized by mental health professionals to be sufficiently severe to warrant its inclusion as a focus of clinical attention in the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV; American

Assessing the physical violence component of the Revised Conflict Tactics Scales when used in heterosexual couples: an item response theory analysis

“…Even if this finding agrees with several previous reports 16,17,18,22,23,28,34,35,36 , it has the strength of being based on a full information factor analysis. Note that this result is central to what follows, since a single dimensionality of a scale being scrutinized is essential to render item response theory interpretable 24 .…”

MAOA, maltreatment, and gene–environment interaction predicting children's mental health: new evidence and a meta-analysis

“…A methodological study demonstrated strong reliability and validity for the partner violence scale (i.e., 0.89 internal consistency and 75% inter-partner agreement). 37 Children in the 'probable' maltreatment category were classified as having physical abuse exposure if their families were in the top 5% of the distribution of partner violence at either the age-5 or age-7 assessments. This method resulted in 28 boys from the 'probable maltreatment' group being added to the group of children we classified for this article as having been exposed to physical abuse.…”

Development and Confirmatory Factor Analysis of the Non‐Violent and Violent Offending Behavior Scale (NVOBS)

“…Potential items were selected by reviewing existing measures of delinquency (which included items relating to general violence and non-violent offending) and partner violence and, in order to include a broad range of both violent and non-violent criminal acts (e.g., Bendixen & Olweus, 1999;Borjesson, Aarons, & Dunn, 2003;Dahlberg, Toal & Behrens, 1998;Huizinga, Esbensen, & Weiher, 1991;Mak, 1993;Moffitt & Silva, 1988;Moffitt et al, 1997;Straus, 1979;Straus, Hamby, Boney-McCoy, & Sugarman, 1996). Initially, 119 items were selected from the literature review and a pilot study was conducted to investigate the prevalence of the behaviors in women as violent and criminal scales tend to be developed on men.…”