Likelihood Of Physical Violence Research Articles

Empowered or impoverished: the impact of panic buttons on domestic violence

AbstractThis paper estimates the causal effect of a targeted panic button program—implemented in two Turkish provinces between 2012 and 2016—on domestic violence. Difference-in-differences and synthetic control estimates suggest that the program notably increased physical violence against women both at the extensive and intensive margins. The likelihood of physical violence in the treated provinces increased by more than 5 percentage points relative to the control provinces, and the number of physical violence incidents increased by about 10 percent. The increase comes almost entirely from the increase in violence against less-educated women. Employment rates and economic independence indicators improved for women in the treated provinces, which suggests that the program empowered vulnerable women. However, male partners increased physical violence in response to female empowerment. The results are consistent with the male backlash theories and a class of non-cooperative models incorporating violence as a vehicle for enhancing males’ bargaining power, but inconsistent with the models predicting that economic empowerment of women reduces violence by balancing bargaining power within the household. We also develop a method based on retrospective violence information to understand whether the increase is attributable to actual or self-reported violence and conclude that the estimates are entirely driven by the increase in actual violence.

Bayesian misclassification and propensity score methods for clustered observational studies

ABSTRACTBayesian propensity score regression analysis with misclassified binary responses is proposed to analyse clustered observational data. This approach utilizes multilevel models and corrects for misclassification in the responses. Using the deviance information criterion (DIC), the performance of the approach is compared with approaches without correcting for misclassification, multilevel structure specification, or both in the study of the impact of female employment on the likelihood of physical violence. The smallest DIC confirms that our proposed model best fits the data. We conclude that female employment has an insignificant impact on the likelihood of physical spousal violence towards women. In addition, a simulation study confirms that the proposed approach performed best in terms of bias and coverage rate. Ignoring misclassification in response or multilevel structure of data would yield biased estimation of the exposure effect.