Abstract
Building on a handful of studies demonstrating battered women’s accuracy in assessing their risk of being physically reabused, this study examined how accurately victims assess their risk of future psychological abuse. Participants’ ratings of the likelihood that their partner would engage in controlling/dominance behaviors or efforts to humiliate/degrade them in the coming year and their reports 18 months later of whether this had actually occurred were used to create a four category version of accuracy (true positive, false positive, true negative, false negative). Victims were more likely to be right than wrong in their assessments of risk; PTSD symptoms, the recency of physical violence, and the degree of stalking and psychological abuse in the relationship predicted membership in the four accuracy categories. These findings overlap considerably with those examining victim accuracy in predicting physical abuse and inform ongoing debates about the value of incorporating victims’ insights into risk assessment efforts.
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Notes
It is important to note that these women were not necessarily individuals who were unsure about what would happen during the next year. Given our use of a sum score, some of these participants were actually quite sure that one event would happen in the next year (rating of 5) but also quite sure that another would not (rating of 1). Analyses not detailed here revealed that dropping participants with sum scores of 6, including them with participants whose sum scores were from 1 to 5, and including them with participants whose sum scores were from 7 to 10 all resulted in very similar findings.
It would have been optimal to have a more precise match between the time frame for which Time 1 risk was assessed (one year) and the time period for which reabuse was assessed (18 months). This was not feasible given the data available. We felt however that victims’ assessments of risk over the next year and their assessments of risk over the next 18 months would likely be very similar, such that the mismatch would have minimal impact on the validity of our results.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful for the contributions made by everyone who has worked on this longitudinal project but particularly wish to thank Jane Murphy and Dorothy Lennig, and to express appreciation for the funding provided by The National Institute of Justice.
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Bell, M.E., Cattaneo, L.B., Goodman, L.A. et al. Assessing the Risk of Future Psychological Abuse: Predicting the Accuracy of Battered Women’s Predictions. J Fam Viol 23, 69–80 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-007-9128-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-007-9128-5