Measuring attitudes about intimate partner violence against women: the ATT-IPV scale.
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.
Hubert Department of Global Health and Department of Sociology, Emory University, 1518 Clifton Road NE, Atlanta, GA, 30322, USA, kyount@emory.edu.
Kathryn M
KM
Yount
Kristin
K
VanderEnde
Sarah
S
Zureick-Brown
Hoang Tu
HT
Anh
Sidney Ruth
SR
Schuler
Tran Hung
TH
Minh
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001290:Attitude; D005260:Female; D005783:Gender Identity; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D011203:Poverty; D013179:Spouse Abuse / Q000208:ethnology* / Q000523:psychology*; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D014744:Vietnam; D055815:Young Adult