Modeling Acts of Aggression and Dominance as Wife Abuse and Exploring Their Adverse Health Effects

Abstract

This study, based on data from the Canadian Violence Against Women Survey, determined the effectiveness of modeling of aggression and dominance as causal indicators of forms of wife abuse and their effects on women's health, including physical injuries, psychopathology, alterations to the psyche, anger, alcohol and drug use, and subsequent general health status. When income, education, and age were controlled, abused wives who developed psychopathology or used drugs or medications to cope had poorer longterm health, regardless of when the abuse occurred. Health problems were influenced by the frequency of abuse, whether it occurred during pregnancy, and the nature of the abuse, as well as the severity of physical injuries sustained. Abuse during pregnancy resulted in poorer outcomes. The initial estimated model relied on severity weights for the of physical aggression reported in the literature. Through model revision, new estimates of the relative severity of various of physical aggression in relation to their likelihood of causing injury are provided. Key Words: health, psychological abuse, sexual abuse, structural equation model, violence, wife abuse. The Conflict Tactics Scales (CTS; Straus, 1979) frequently have been used to measure the occurrence of wife abuse. Despite widespread use, the scales have been criticized for failing to consider the context in which abuse occurs, differences in severity, and its consequences (Brush, 1993; Dobash, Dobash, Wilson, & Daly, 1992; Straus, 1990a). Straus (1990b) acknowledged that frequency-weighted scales do not reflect the differences in severity of violence inherent in the hierarchical structure of the violent acts (p. 539). For example, a woman who had been slapped six times would score higher than a woman who was severely beaten on three occasions. As a result of these and other drawbacks, Straus (1990b) introduced additional methods of scoring the scales. He indicated that the physical aggression items could be weighted by their frequency of occurrence, by the product of their frequency times a severity weight, or by using Guttman scales. None of these approaches, however, resolves all the problems associated with the confounding of severity and frequency. For example, creating three subscales for minor, severe, or very violence implicitly suggests that all within each scale are of equal severity. Guttman scales account for the hierarchical nature or severity of only if the original ordering of items is correct, but we have little empirical evidence that, for example, being hit with is more severe than being hit with a fist. Additionally, such scaling precludes consideration of the frequency of each act. The most promising approach, the severity-weighted scale, also has limitations. Specifically, there is an underlying assumption that the are intercorrelated and arise from a common cause. Yet, when Hayduk and Avakame (1990/1991) subjected this type of measurement structure to the test provided by multiple-indicator structural equation modeling (Hayduk, 1996; Ratner, Bottorff, Johnson, & Hayduk, 1996), they concluded that no single dimension underlay three of the CTS items: having something thrown; being pushed, grabbed, or shoved; and being slapped. (Other CTS items were not included in their model.) Recently, Straus, Hamby, Boney-McCoy, and Sugarman (1996) published a revised version of the CTS (the CTS2). The revised scale, now 39 items, distinguishes between minor and severe of physical assault and adds two scales measuring sexual coercion and physical injury. The work presented here is based on conceptualizations of physical aggression that underlie both versions of the CTS and introduces an approach to incorporating notions of severity that may resolve some of the problems associated with the approaches described above. The present study analyzed data collected in a cross-sectional survey and estimated a structural equation model that specified the relationships among various forms of wife abuse and their health consequences. …