The Development of a Measure of Psychological Maltreatment of Women by Their Male Partners

• Published in: Violence and victims Vol. 4; no. 3; pp. 159 - 177
• Main Author: Tolman, Richard M.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY Springer Publishing Company 01.01.1989; Springer
• Subjects: Adult; Battered Women; Behavior; Behavioral Sciences; Biological and medical sciences; Conflict (Psychology); Counseling; Emotional abuse; Family Violence; Female; Humans; Indexes (Measures); Investigations; Male; Males; Marriage and Family Counselling; Medical sciences; Methodology (Data Collection); Offenders; Personality Tests; Pilot Projects; Policy, Social Justice, and Human Rights; Prisoners of war & missing in action; Psychology; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychometrics; Psychopathology. Psychiatry; R&D; Reliability; Research & development; Scales; Social and Personality Psychology; Social Work; Spouse Abuse; Spouse Abuse - psychology; Studies; Victimology; Violence; Human; Social environment; Marital relation; Psychological Maltreatment of Woman Inventory; Fidelity; Factor analysis; Statistical analysis; Psychometrics; Test validation; Factor structure; Conflict; Checklist; Family environment; Adult; Battered wife syndrome
• ISSN: 0886-6708; 1945-7073
• DOI: 10.1891/0886-6708.4.3.159

This study describes the initial development of a scale of measurement of psychological maltreatment of women by their male partners. The initial version of the scale was administered to 407 men and 207 women at intake into a domestic violence program. All 58 items of the scale were endorsed by a large enough number of subjects to warrant inclusion in the final instrument. Factor analysis revealed a similar factor structure for the men and women, with dominance-isolation and emotional-verbal abuse factors emerging from the analysis. Intracouple reliability for each item of the scale was examined for the subset of men and women who were cohabiting couples (n = 28). Unsurprisingly, the agreement of men's and women's reports was low, though the scores on the domination-isolation subscale were significantly correlated.