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

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Demography

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) (N 1 = 527) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) (N 2 = 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.

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Notes

  1. Variations include hitting only; beating only; and in one case, hitting, beating, kicking, or pushing.

  2. Wording variations are do you agree or disagree with, are you in agreement with, is it normal that, is it okay for, is it legitimate that, and does a husband have a right to.

  3. The 2006 MICS translation of this question was, “In your opinion, do you find acceptable for the husband to hit or beat his wife in the following situations [. . .]? Our translation includes only “beat” because only one word was included in Vietnamese (Đánh).

  4. The 2010–2011 MICS translation was, “In your opinion, is a husband justified in hitting or beating his wife in the following situations: . . .”

  5. The translation in the survey report was, “In your opinion, does a man have a good reason to hit his wife if: . . .”

  6. One man aged 51 years at the time of interview was included in the sample.

  7. “Don’t know” responses were coded as missing. Across all 10 items, 0–10 responses were missing.

  8. For 20 demographic attributes, including age, completed grades of schooling, and household wealth, we found no significant differences between the random split-half subsamples (p ≤ .05).

  9. See Yount et al. (2014) for a similar analysis with other attitudinal items regarding women’s recourse after exposure to IPV.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by NIH research Grant 5R21HD067834-01/02 (PIs Yount and Schuler) and the Hubert Department of Global Health, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University. The article was written while Dr. Sarah Zureick-Brown was a postdoctoral fellow in the Hubert Department of Global Health, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University. The authors thank anonymous reviewers for their comments on a prior version of this article. The authors also thank Vu Song Ha, Quach Trang, the entire field staff, and all participants for their time, effort, and dedication to this project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hubert Department of Global Health and Department of Sociology, Emory University, 1518 Clifton Road NE, Atlanta, GA, 30322, USA

    Kathryn M. Yount

  2. Hubert Department of Global Health, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Kristin VanderEnde & Sarah Zureick-Brown

  3. Center for Creative Initiatives in Health and Population, Hanoi, Vietnam

    Hoang Tu Anh & Tran Hung Minh

  4. Family Health International 360, Durham, NC, USA

    Sidney Ruth Schuler

  5. Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

    Hoang Tu Anh

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  1. Kathryn M. Yount
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  2. Kristin VanderEnde
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  3. Sarah Zureick-Brown
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  4. Hoang Tu Anh
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  5. Sidney Ruth Schuler
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Correspondence to Kathryn M. Yount.

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Yount, K.M., VanderEnde, K., Zureick-Brown, S. et al. Measuring Attitudes About Intimate Partner Violence Against Women: The ATT-IPV Scale. Demography 51, 1551–1572 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-014-0297-6

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