Physical Violence in American Families

Murray Straus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781560008286
• eBook ISBN: 9781351499682
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Psychology

The informative and controversial findings in this book are based on two path-breaking national surveys of American families. Both show that while the family may be the central locus of love and support, it is also the locus of risk for those who are physically assaulted. The book provides a wealth of information on gender differences and similarities in violence, and on the effects of gender roles and inequality.Two landmark American studies of violence from the National Family Violence survey form the basis of this book. Both show that while the family may be the central locus of love and support, it is also the locus of risk for those who are being physically assaulted. This is particularly true for women and children, who are statistically more at risk of assault in their own homes than on the streets of any American city. Physical Violence in American Families provides a wealth of information on gender differences and similarities in violence, and on the effects of gender roles and inequality. It is essential for anyone doing empirical research or clinical assessment.

PART I
Researching Family Violence

1
The National Family Violence Surveys

Murray A. Straus

This book brings together the methods and findings of two landmark studies: the National Family Violence Survey conducted in 1975 and the National Family Violence Resurvey of 1985. These two studies are landmarks in the field of family violence in several senses. First, the 1975 study represents the earliest attempt to measure the incidence of violence in a large and representative sample of American families. Second, the availability of data on a representative sample enabled researchers to move beyond the “individual pathology” model of family violence (Gelles, 1974; Gelles and Straus, 1979) to investigate underlying social causes. Finally, use of the same measures of violence in the two surveys allowed us to examine national trends in the incidence of family violence over that ten-year period.

The Samples

The National Family Violence Surveys are the only nationally representative studies of family violence.¹ Before 1975 the empirical research was based on an insufficient number of cases or samples that represent special populations, such as students or women who have gotten help from a shelter for battered women. There are obvious limitations to how far one can generalize on the basis of samples of university students about their families—the method we first used to gather data on intrafamily violence (Straus, 1971, 1973).

There are also limits on what is possible with studies of families that have come to public attention (e.g., police intervention), or clients of battered women’s shelters, or of men in treatment programs for batterers. Data on those groups are extremely important because police departments and shelters need information about the people they will actually deal with and such studies provide that information. However, studies based on “clinical” samples run the risk of what has been called the “clinical fallacy” because the information may not apply to families where the wife has been assaulted but the husband was not arrested or the wife did not seek help from a shelter for battered women. These are the overwhelming majority of cases. The police intervene or the wife goes to a shelter in only a tiny proportion of cases of wife beating. For example, the 1985 survey found that an arrest was made in only 1% of the cases involving assaults on wives (see Chapter 25). So research based on samples from police records or clients of safe houses, such as Dobash and Dobash (1979), leaves out 99% of all assaulted wives. At the same time, the fact that clinical populations tend to be different from populations who seem to exhibit the same problem but are not receiving treatment suggests that it may be dangerous to base treatment methods on findings from epidemiological surveys such as the two National Family Violence Surveys. In Chapter 5,1 call this the “representative sample fallacy.”

The importance of a large as well as a representative sample also needs to be emphasized. The 2,143 families in the first survey, together with the 6,002 in the second survey, may be more than the combined number of cases in all other research on family violence so far. The decision to interview six thousand couples for the second survey was particularly difficult because, with a limited budget, this meant a shorter interview and therefore not obtaining much important information that we obtained on the families in the first survey. However, one of the purposes of the 1985 survey was to determine if there had been a change in the rates of child abuse and spouse abuse between 1975 and 1985 (see Chapter 7). Even the large differences we found would not have been statistically reliable had we done the 1985 survey with the same number of cases as were studied in 1975. This is because the behavior being studied has a low “base rate.” For example, “only” about 4% of American wives report being severely assaulted in 1985. In addition, there are groups in the population such as unmarried cohabiting couples who, although a small percentage of the total, are theoretically important. If such couples have the same incidence of assault on a partner as married couples, the number of violent cohabiting couples in a sample of 6,002 is : (6002 * .04 * .04) = 9.6. Thus, even starting with a sample of six thousand, only about ten cases of violent cohabiting couples would be available for analysis. Thus a large number of families must be surveyed in order to have sufficient numbers of violent families to carry out statistical analyses.

Appendix 1 describes how the samples were selected and other information about how the two surveys were conducted. One point to note on the terminology used in this book concerns the fact that unmarried cohabiting couples were included in both surveys. For some purposes the cohabiting couples were analyzed separately from the married couples (e.g., Chapter 13). Unless stated otherwise, we treated cohabitation as simply one of many variations in the family, in which case terms such as marital, spouse, wife, and husband are used to refer to all couples, regardless of whether they are married or nonmarried cohabiting persons.²

The Conflict Tactics Scales

The second way in which these two surveys are landmarks lies in the method of gathering the data that made them possible—the Conflict Tactics Scales (CTS). Before the 1975 survey few people believed it would be possible to knock on the door of a random sample of households and be able to obtain data on the incidence and extent of violent acts between members of that household. Gelles’s pioneer study of The Violent Home (1974) demonstrated that one could obtain such information by personal interviews. However, the great advantage of that study—its use of in-depth qualitative interviews—made it unsuitable for large epidemiological surveys. The insights gained from exploratory interviews conducted by Straus in 1971 and from Gelles’s 1974 study provided the basis for an instrument to measure family violence that is suitable for use in large-scale surveys: the Conflict Tactics Scales.

As its name implies, the CTS is designed to measure a variety of behaviors used in conflicts between family members. The tactics fall into three general modes: rational discussion, termed Reasoning; verbal or nonverbal acts that symbolically hurt the other, termed Verbal Aggression; and the use of physical aggression, termed Violence. The CTS is now the most widely used method of obtaining data about physical violence in families. It is the means of measuring family violence in over 200 papers and 5 books.

Since almost all the chapters in this book are based on data obtained through the use of the CTS, it is desirable to gain an understanding of this instrument by reading Chapter 3—the basic methodological and theoretical source on the CTS. However, by way of summary, a brief description of the CTS is given below.

As indicated above, the CTS measures behaviors or tactics used in response to a conflict or anger situation during the previous 12 months, rather than the substantive issue giving rise to the anger or conflict. Indeed, there may have been conflicts over a number of issues. The CTS asks respondents to recall the times “in the past year” when they and their partner “disagree on major decisions, get annoyed about something the other person does, or just have spats or fights because they’re in a bad mood or tired or for some other reason.”

The instructions go on to say: “I’m going to read a list of some things that you and your partner might have done when you had a dispute and would like you to tell me for each one how often you did it in the past year.” The list begins with the items from the Reasoning scale, such as “Discussed the issue calmly,” goes on to the items in the Verbal Aggression scale, such as “Insulted or swore at the other,” and ends with the Physical Aggression or “Violence” or “Assault” items, such as “Threw something at [the child or partner].”

The Violence items are further subdivided into “Minor” and “Severe” Violence. The Minor Violence items are threw something at the other family member; pushed, grabbed, or shoved; and slapped or spanked. The Severe Violence items are kicked, bit, or punched; hit or tried to hit with an object; beat up; choked, or for parent-to-child violence burned or scalded; threatened with a knife or gun; and used a knife or gun. These items have been used to create a number of measures. The following are the most frequently used of these (others are described in the chapters where they are used and in Appendix B):

1. Overall Violence: the use of any of the above acts.
2. Minor Violence: use of the minor violence acts, but not any of the acts in the severe violence list.
3. Severe Violence: use of any of the acts in the severe violence list. Almost all such persons have also engaged in minor assaults. The severe violence index is the way in which we usually measured “child abuse” and “wife beating.”
4. Very Severe Violence: This measure was created because hitting a child with certain objects, such as hairbrush or belt, is often considered part of traditional physical punishment, rather than “abuse.” Omitting the “hit with object” item leaves a list of acts that are indubitably abusive and therefore come closer to the popular conception of child abuse. In some chapters this is identified as the “Child Abuse-1” rate and the Severe Violence Index is called the “Child Abuse-2” rate.

The Social Causes of Family Violence

A third way in which the two National Family Violence Surveys are landmark studies is that they provide a large body of evidence suggesting that the major causes of physical violence in the family are to be found in certain basic characteristics of the American family and American society. Among these characteristics are male dominance in the family and the society and millions of people living in poverty in one of the wealthiest societies in human history.

This is not to say that the two surveys were the first manifestation of the theoretical perspective that looks to characteristics of the society (rather than the characteristics of individual persons) as the causes of violence. There is a long tradition of such research in sociology (see for example Curtis, 1974; Gil, 1970; Loftin and Hill, 1974; Wolfgang and Ferracuti, 1967). It has been the theoretical core of our research since 1970, as illustrated by articles on the social causes of both ordinary physical punishment (Straus, 1971) and child abuse (Gelles, 1973), male dominance, and wife beating (Straus, 1973) and an entire book devoted to The Social Causes of Husband-Wife Violence (Straus and Hotaling, 1980). However, these studies either were theoretical analysis or used inadequate empirical data. The National Family Violence Surveys changed that radically. Analyses of these large and nationally representative samples of families reported in Parts III, IV, and V reveal that a large proportion of the variance in wife beating and child abuse is linked to the social characteristics of the families and their position in society.

A More Comprehensive Analysis of Violence

Still another way in which these surveys broke new ground is that they breached the pattern of basing research on interviews with battered women. It is critically important that assailants also be studied. In both 1975 and 1985 about half of the respondents were husbands and half were wives. It would have been even better to study husbands and wives in the same household. But just the fact that we were able to obtain data from aggressors as well as victims resulted in unique and controversial findings.

Until the 1975 study, research on family violence was focused on either child abuse or spouse abuse. There do not seem to have been studies that gathered data on both, despite the obvious theoretical links (Gelles and Straus, 1979). The 1975 survey broke new ground by obtaining data on both child abuse and spouse abuse and also data on sibling abuse and physical abuse of parents by children. This enabled us to investigate the links between different types of family violence.

Trend and Panel Studies

The two National Family Violence Surveys are unique in still another respect. The same method of measuring violence was used in both studies. This made it possible to provide information on the much-debated question of whether child abuse and wife beating have been increasing. No other data exist that can provide information on changes in the rate of child abuse and spouse abuse during the 10-year period between the two surveys.

The annual tabulations of child abuse cases known to Child Protective Services in each of the states seem to provide information on change in the incidence of child abuse. These figures have been increasing at a compound annual rate of about 10% per year since the statistics were first gathered in 1976 (American Association for Protecting Children, 1986). However, it is almost certain that child abuse did not increase at this rate (if at all) between 1975 and 1985.

As explained in Chapter 7, the increase in “officially reported” cases of child abuse represents an increase in the number of “interventions” or “treatments” for child abuse, not an increase in the number of abused children. The real rate could have remained the same or been decreasing or increasing. Only a comparison of rates derived from “epidemiological surveys” such as the 1975 and 1985 surveys could even begin to provide data on this issue.

Finally, both the 1975 and the 1985 surveys provide the basis for future studies that can and should be extended into the future. If the basic procedure is replicated again in 1995 and 2005 it will provide the nation with a unique time series on this important social indicator. We have not made plans for such work, but it seems highly likely that there will be resurveys in the future.

On the other hand, we have already used the 1985 survey as the baseline year for a three-wave panel study (see Chapter 27). The families interviewed in 1985 were reinterviewed in 1986 and 1987, and we may try to locate them again after five years in 1992. Thus the trend studies using 1975 as the base year and the panel studies using 1985 as the base year mean that the work described in this book will be the basis for important research continuing into the next century.

Differences and Similarities between t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Chapters co-authored by
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• PART I Researching Family Violence
• PART II Incidence and Trends
• PART III The Social Psychology of Family Violence
• PART IV Family Organization and Family Violence
• PART V Violence and the Structure of Society
• PART VI The Aftermath of Family Violence: Coping and Consequences of Violence
• PART VII Stopping Family Violence
• Methodological Appendixes
• Appendix A Sample Design and Comparability of the Two National Surveys
• Appendix B New Scoring Methods for Violence and New Norms for the Conflict Tactics Scales
• About the Authors
• References
• Index