Researching Intimate Partner Violence Against Women (IPVAW): Overcoming Gender Blindness by Improving Methodology in Compliance with Measurement Standards

Abstract

Intimate Partner Violence Against Women (IPVAW) has been defined as a violation of human rights and a serious public health problem rooted in social inequality between women and men. Nevertheless, a significant amount of scientific literature on the topic of IPVAW continues to exclude the gender perspective in both research design and the interpretation of results, despite its conceptual and explanatory relevance. This paper considers certain gender-blind practices in the research on IPVAW. Based on this analysis, we propose explicitly stating the theoretical assumptions inherent in the definition of the construct and clarifying the intended interpretation for measures, so that they can be incorporated into the analysis of validity, and we argue in favor of the need for interdisciplinary studies based on multicausal explanatory models, which incorporate the category gender as a transversal explanatory factor of this type of violence, as well as multi-method approaches, with the aim of overcoming issues of construct underrepresentation and construct-irrelevant variance.

Developing and Testing New Domestic Abuse Questions and Approach for the Crime Survey for England and Wales

“…As is the case for most DA surveys, headline prevalence in the CSEW has been presented as a descriptive statistic using the frequency of physical abuse and the frequencies of other behaviors linked to demographic information. However, as outlined earlier, this may result in misidentification of DA with respect to severity and a lack of attention to differences in experience, for instance, between men and women (Sanchez-Prada et al 2023;Johnson 2008). To obtain a more nuanced and realistic picture of DA that can be more useful to policy makers and support agencies, we propose that the 'COHSAR' analytical approach be applied to the DA question data to identify abuse profiles and provide headline prevalence for coercively controlling violence and abuse.…”

“…Finally, the dynamics and context of intimate relationships have been another key area that others have argued is important to understand in DA. Sanchez-Prada and colleagues, for instance, urge that surveys "provide an adequate contextualization of the behaviors under study, such as questions that can evaluate the positions of power within the relationship" (Sanchez-Prada et al 2023, p. 1044. We asked participants if we should include a question that will allow the survey to capture where the power lies in terms of decision making, negotiation between partners, whether somebody is allowed to voice their opinion, has freedom of personal choice, or possibly pick up on the presence of traditional gender roles or entitlement.…”

“…An ongoing concern in the literature has been the importance of accurately measuring effects related to gender as well as wider intersectional inequalities (Sanchez-Prada et al 2023). While questionnaire-based surveys tend to assume that participants interpret questions in similar ways, men may underreport their perpetration of violence and may overreport victimization (Ackerman 2016).…”