Italian Validation of the Scale of Psychological Abuse in Intimate Partner Violence (EAPA-P).

Giulia Lausi,Anna Maria Giannini,Clarissa Cricenti,Benedetta Barchielli,Jessica Burrai

doi:10.3390/ijerph182312717

Abstract

Psychological and emotional forms of violence often represent a danger alarm and an important risk factor for other forms of intimate partner violence (IPV). Measuring psychological violence raises several issues of conceptualization and definition, which lead to the development of several assessment instruments; among them, the Scale of Psychological Abuse in Intimate Partner Violence (EAPA-P) showed good psychometric proprieties in a Spanish population and is used to identify which strategies are acted out to engage in psychological violence. The aim of the present study was to investigate the psychometric properties of the Italian version of EAPA-P among a group of Italian-speaking women (N = 343), thus evaluating its psychometric characteristics. Based on the English translation of the original Spanish version, an 11-item form of the EAPA-P was obtained, validity has been assessed through measures of emotion dysregulation, interpersonal guilt, conflict among partners and depression, anxiety, and stress symptomatology. Moreover, differences among groups were conducted to identify the capacity of the Italian version of EAPA-P to discriminate among women reporting experiencing psychological violence (N = 179), and who don’t (N = 150). Results showed an excellent internal validity, good correlations, and a good discriminatory ability of the scale. Strengths, limitations, and practical implications of the study have been discussed according to recent literature.

Highlights

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a heterogeneous construct that includes several forms of violence—physical, sexual, economic, psychological/emotional, stalking—perpetrated by an intimate partner [1,2,3]
A maximum likelihood confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was initially conducted to verify the correspondence between the data obtained and the factor structure proposed by the authors [70]
Results showed that the total EAPA-P scale positively correlates with all forms of partner abuse, with subdimensions of guilt (e.g., Self-Hate, as measured by the IGRS-15), with emotional dysregulation (DERS-20), and with symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress (DASS-21), while negatively correlates with negotiation abilities (Negotiation subscale of CTS-2)

Summary

Introduction

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a heterogeneous construct that includes several forms of violence—physical, sexual, economic, psychological/emotional, stalking—perpetrated by an intimate partner [1,2,3]. Given the heterogeneity of IPV, it has been suggested to assess the occurrence of all forms of violence to detect the presence of emotional abuse or coercive control that may represent the first expression of maltreatment in intimate relationships and/or be indicative of a more severe form of IPV [3,17,18]. These considerations underlie the effort made in recent years in studying the consequences of different forms of IPV on women’s health. Several studies [17,19,20] highlighted experiencing psychological violence alone or in conjunction with other forms of violence leads to similar, if not more severe, mental health effects [3,13,21], even after exiting the abusive relationship [22,23]

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Conclusion