What you say and what I hear—Investigating differences in the perception of the severity of psychological and physical violence in intimate partner relationships

Abstract

The correct communication of the severity of violence is essential in the context of legal trials, custody cases, support of victims, etc., for providing fair treatment. A narrator that communicates their experiences of interpersonal violence may rate the seriousness of the incident differently than a rater reading the narrator’s text, suggesting that there exist perceptual differences (PD) in severity ratings between the narrator and the rater. We propose that these perceptual differences may depend on whether the narrative is based on physical or psychological violence, and on gender differences. Physical violence may be evaluated as more serious by the receiver of the narrative than by the narrator (Calibration PD), whereas the seriousness of psychological violence may be difficult to convey, leading to a discrepancy in the seriousness ratings between the narrator and the rater (Accuracy PD). In addition, gender stereotypes may influence the seriousness rating (Gender PD), resulting in violence against women being perceived as more serious than the same violence against men. These perceptual differences were investigated in 3 phases using a new experimental procedure. In Phase 1, 113 narrators provided descriptions and seriousness ratings of self-experienced physical and psychological violence in relationships. In Phase 2, 340 independent raters rated the seriousness of 10 randomly selected narrations from Phase 1. In Phase 3, the genders in the narrations were changed to the opposite gender, and seriousness ratings were collected from 340 different raters. Our results confirmed the hypothesized perceptual differences. Violence to male victims was considerably more likely to be seen as severe when the raters were misled to believe the victim was a woman. We propose that these data provide practical guidelines for how to deal with misinformation in the communication of violence. The data also show that mean values and the confidence of such severity ratings need to be adjusted for several factors, such as whether it is self-experienced or communicated, the type of violence, and the gender of the victims and raters.

Educational Intervention to Decrease Justification of Adolescent Dating Violence: A Comparative Quasi-Experimental Study

“…These results are consistent with those from a study that examined the justification of violence bidirectionally [ 32 ] and with more recent studies, which show higher levels of justification for physical violence committed by girls [ 33 ]. They are congruent with other reports [ 34 , 35 ] on the differences observed between boys and girls in their ratings of the severity of aggression, which suggests that participants may perceive that the same physical aggression is more harmful and has more serious consequences when the aggressor is a boy as well as when the victim is a girl [ 36 , 37 ].…”

Removing Biases in Communication of Severity Assessments of Intimate Partner Violence: Model Development and Evaluation

“…We studied the data set collected by Sikström et al [ 29 ], where accuracy and calibration biases were found for psychological and physical violence.…”

“…The data analyzed in this study [ 29 ] were collected in 2 phases (phase 1 [P1] and phase 2 [P2]) using the Prolific Academic website for online recruiting. The process used is described next.…”

“…Most studies within the field have been conducted using vignettes, or video clips, of violent events [ 28 ] without the possibility of directly comparing real-life experienced and communicated violent events. In a previous study by our research group, we suggested a method where a group of participants were asked to describe self-experienced psychological and physical violent events and rate the severity of the violence [ 29 ]. The texts were subsequently read and evaluated by another set of participants.…”

“…This method allowed us to directly compare the severity ratings of self-experienced and communicated events of violence, where the differences between these ratings were communication biases ( Figure 1 ). In our study [ 29 ], we investigated 2 types of assessments ( calibration bias and accuracy bias ) under 2 types of violence (physical and psychological; Figure 2 ). By calibration bias, we mean the empirical phenomena by which an individual who experiences a violent event evaluates the severity of the violence of the event differently than a person, or an algorithm, to whom this event is communicated.…”