NCJ Number
143978
Date Published
1993
Length
12 pages
Annotation
This article presents the results of a study of violence and injury in married couples and discusses the problems of using data from surveys such as the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) to study spouse abuse.
Abstract
The discussion focuses on feminist and nonfeminist approaches to studying violence in married couples and describes the longstanding empirical dispute that exists in violence research and that involves quantitative comparisons of reports of violent acts by husbands and wives. the NSFH was a national, multistage, area probability sample survey of the population ages 19 and older and living in households. The analysis focused on the 5,474 married primary participants who were living with a spouse. The NSFH confirmed earlier evidence of women's acting violently in couples. Results revealed no significant difference between wives and husbands in reports of hitting, shoving, or throwing things in the current relationship. However, women were more likely than men to report that they were injured in the course of disagreements with their partners, even in cases in which both men and women were violent. The findings empirically refute the battered husband syndrome and also demonstrate the importance of developing innovative methods of eliciting information about intimate violence from survey participants. In addition, several factors may explain the finding that the overall levels of reported violent acts were considerably lower than in previous surveys. Findings indicated the need to improve the content and context of surveys on violence, despite resource limitations that will make such changes difficult. Tables and 25 references