This paper presents data from a multi-national study of dating relationships of university students called the International Dating Violence Study. The data describe the first 14 university sites in eight countries (three in Europe, two in North America, two in Latin America, and one each in Asia, and the Middle East). The methodological results show that the measures of physical and sexual violence have acceptable to high alpha coefficients of reliability in all but one of the sites and that there is evidence indicating the construct validity of these measures. The rates of physical and sexual assault against dating partners by students Reveal both important differences between sites and important similarities across sites. Perhaps the most important similarity is the high rate of violence against dating partners by both male and female students in all the sites. Even the sites that had lower rates relative to other sites in absolute terms had a high rate of physical assault and sexual coercion including the use of physical force to coerce sex. These psychometric and substantive results support proceeding with expanding the study to the planned 34 nations.

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This paper has three objectives. First, it describes a multi-national investigation of violence in the dating relationships of university students called the International Dating Violence Study. Second, it presents preliminary methodological information on the reliability and validity for cross-national research of the scales used to measure violence against dating partners. Third, it presents preliminary results on rates of physical and sexual assault against dating partners by students at 14 universities in eight countries (three in Europe, two in North America, two in Latin America, and one each in Asia, and the Middle East). These are the first sites of a planned 34 nation study.

It is now widely recognized that relationships between partners in marital, cohabiting, and dating relationships are often violent (Barnett, Miller-Perrin, and Perrin 1997; Gelles and Straus 1988 Add most recent review reference). Recognition of the high-risk nature of dating relationships is important in order to take steps to make intimate partner relationships free of violence. However, it is not widely recognized that dating couples are even more likely to be violent than married couples, despite the fact that the higher rate has been demonstrated by over 50 studies, starting in the 1980’s (Stets and Straus 1989; Sugarman and Hotaling 1989). For purposes of primary-prevention (Cowen 1978; O'Leary and Sweet Jemmott 1995), it is vital to increase understanding of the etiology of dating-couple violence because the behavior at that point in the life-cycle can establish patterns that persist over a lifetime (O'Leary, Barling, Arias, Rosenbaum, Malone, and Tyree 1989; O'Leary, Malone, and Tyree 1994).

Numerous studies in the USA and Canada have found an extremely high prevalence of physical and sexual assault on dating partners by university students. For example, in Canada and the USA 20 to 40% of students report one or more assaults in the previous 12 months. This article provides preliminary data on the extent to which these high rates are found in other countries, and gender differences in dating partner violence in each of the 14 university samples. It also presents results on the reliability and validity of the measures of physical assault and sexual coercion. A long-term objective of the International Dating Violence Study is to test the applicability of theories purporting to explain the occurrence of intimate partner violence to student couples in diverse societies, but work on that aspect of the study is only at the beginning stage.

The International Dating Violence study is focused on the dating relationships of university students for a number of reasons. (1) Data on university students can be obtained in a uniform way by inexpensive questionnaires. This puts participation in the study within the resources of investigators in many countries. (2) In many countries, heterosexual relationships in the form of “dating” are more likely to exist among university students than in other sectors of the population. (3) As indicated above, a large number of studies show that both physical assaults and sexual coercion occur very frequently among student dating couples. The rate of physical assault typically ranges from 25 to 40 percent (Sugarman and Hotaling 1989). (4) University students are an appropriate population because in many countries they constitute a sizeable population. In the USA, for example, there are about 15 million currently enrolled. (5) Students are at a formative period in their lives, especially in relation to the development of appropriate patterns of behavior with an intimate partner. The patterns manifested at this age are often enduring features of their relationship, (Murphy and O'Leary 1989; O'Leary et al. 1989; O'Leary, Malone, and Tyree 1994; Pan, Neidig, and O'Leary 1994).

Definition Of Dating

For purposes of this study dating was defined as a dyadic relationship involving meeting for social interaction and joint activities and an explicit or implicit intention to continue the relationship until one or the other party terminates or until some other more committed relationship is established such as cohabiting, engagement, or marriage. The social norms for dating, and actual dating behavior, differ according to many dimensions, including individual differences, racial/ethnic and socioeconomic group differences, historical era, and cultural context. Despite these differences, there are also some inherent structural similarities; for example, it is a dyadic relationship and the parties usually invest time and energy. Therefore social interactional process typical of dyads are likely to apply regardless of whether the relationship was arranged by parents or friends, by newspaper or by internet, or by one party initiating the development of a relationship. Thus, the principles of theories such as exchange theory and conflict theory could to apply to these types of relationships (whatever, they are named) in the national contexts to be studied.

THE INTERNATIONAL DATING VIOLENCE STUDY

The International Dating Violence study is being conducted by members of a research consortium in 34 countries. A detailed description of the study, including the questionnaire and all other key documents, is available on the website http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2. Some of the key characteristics of the study are:

· It uses a well-validated instrument to measure intimate partner violence – The revised Conflict Tactics Scales or CTS2 (Straus, Hamby, Boney-McCoy, and Sugarman 1996). The CTS2 has been successfully used in many countries with respondents of all socioeconomic levels, including low educated rural and urban populations and university students.

· It examines an unusually wide range of etiological variables because it uses the Personal and Relationships Profile or (PRP) to measure 22 variables associated with partner violence (Straus, Hamby, Boney-McCoy, and Sugarman 1999; Straus and Mouradian 1999)

· It provides the opportunity to examine the effect of socio-cultural differences on the etiology of dating-violence by examining the issue in different socio-cultural settings, including sites in all the major world regions.

· Each of the participating researchers also investigates issues that are locally salient by adding questions to the standard questionnaire to measure one or more variables that are locally relevant. For example, the questionnaire for the Hong Kong site has questions to measure the importance to the respondent of “saving face.”

· The procedures were field tested with more than a thousand students at three different universities in the USA, and as noted above, the CTS part of the questionnaire has been used successfully in more than 30 countries.

A Collaborative Project

The research is being conducted by researchers in each site who constitute the International Dating Violence Research Consortium. There is a core questionnaire that each member of the continuum translates and then back-translates to maintain “conceptual equivalence” (Straus 1969) across the sites. In addition, as mentioned above, the members add questions to measure variables that are uniquely important for a site or to measure constructs that are needed to test a theory of particular interest to the member. These procedures allow the benefits of both standardized measures for all the sites, and also the benefits of culturally informed investigations of unique issues in each site.

The research is being conducted under the terms of an explicit agreement (see the website cited above) that specifies the rights and obligations of the Principle Investigator and of each consortium member. This agreement is intended to protect the intellectual property rights of all the investigators, while also facilitating publication of the results.

Method Of Administering The Questionnaire

The following procedures are used to draw the samples and to ensure that participation is voluntary and anonymous, and based on informed consent. First, the purpose of the study and the content of the questionnaire, including the fact that it includes questions on sensitive issues, is explained to the students. The same information is printed on the cover page of the questionnaire. They are asked to help by completing the questionnaire and at the same time they are told that answering the questionnaire is entirely voluntary, and that they can also choose to omit any question or questions they do not want to answer. They are also told that the questionnaire is completely anonymous and that to preserve their privacy, they should not write their name anywhere on the questionnaire. Finally, they are told that if they choose to participate, after completing the questionnaire, they should put it in a box which is placed near the exit door. Students who choose not to participate, deposit the blank questionnaire in the same box. This preserves their privacy because no one knows who completed and who did not complete a questionnaire. As students leave, they are given a page listing of phone numbers of local resources that they can call on for help if they have experienced any of the problems covered in the questionnaire.

These procedures have been reviewed by the human subjects protection committee of the University of New Hampshire. Prior to the start of the International Dating Violence study, the procedures were used with more than a thousand students at three institutions, and no problems were encountered. At each site the steps to ensure informed consent, privacy, and safety are reviewed and approved before the data is gathered.

Anticipated Results

A very large number of important issues will be investigated with the data to be obtained. The issues fall into two broad groupings: estimating the prevalence partner violence, and testing theories concerning the individual and societal characteristics associated with partner violence.

Prevalence And Chronicity Of Four Aspects Of Dating Violence. The Revised Conflict Tactics Scales or CTS2 (Straus, Hamby, Boney-McCoy, and Sugarman 1996) is the instrument used to obtain the data on partner violence. The CTS2 provides rates and frequency of occurrence (chronicity) for the following aspects of partner violence (see Appendix 1).

Physical assault

` Physical injury

Psychological aggression

Sexual Coercion

The information on prevalence and chronicity is the most elementary and also the most basic type of information that will result from this study. It provides estimates of the extent to which partners in dating relationships at each site engage in each of these four types of mistreatment of a partner.

Tests Of Theories

The major focus of the International Dating Violence study is to test theories that might explain the differences in dating violence between sites and differences within sites between individuals. The theories will be tested using the data on the characteristics of the couple in the demographic data section of the questionnaire and the measures of risk factors for intimate partner violence in the Personal And Relationships Profile [Straus, 1999 #3261; Straus, 1999 #3300] part of the questionnaire. To take a simple example with demographic data: If students in the sites with high rates of partner assault tend to be younger, differences in the average of students at each site could explain the difference between sites in assault because the younger the person, the greater the probability of assaulting a partner (Stets and Straus 1989; Suitor, Pillemer, and Straus 1990). Another example is the hypothesis that sites with high rates of dominance by one partner tend to have high rates of physical assault on a dating partner. The hypothesis will be tested at both the individual couple level and at the societal level. At the individual couple level dominance is measured by the Dominance scale of the Personal and Relationship Profile. At the societal level Dominance will be measured as a “level 2” variable using The societal level data will use national statistics on measures such as the percent that women’s education is of men’s education.

Limitations

All research has limitations, and the International Dating Violence study is no exception. There is space in this article to only describe one of the most serious of the limitations. It is that the study cannot make generalizations about nations, or even about university students in general in the nations where the data was gathered. This is because students are not necessarily representative of a nation, and because the student samples are not being chosen to be representative of all students. However, this is a theoretically driven study and it is appropriate to make generalizations based on conceptualizing each site as a social entity whose characteristics differ. These site-to-site differences will be measured as level-2 variables using multilevel modeling (Bryk and Raudenbush 1992). The level 2 variables are based on the mean level of the independent variables for each site. For example, a preliminary analysis using the Dominance score of the PRP found significant site-to-site differences in Dominance, and that these differences were significantly related to physically assaulting dating partners. The appropriate generalization from these results is not that students in country X are more prone to assaulting a dating partner, but that students at universities where dating relationships are characterized by a higher level of dominance by one partner tend to also have a high rate of assaults on dating partners. This is a generalization about a theory rather than a generalization about specific sites. It provides the type of data that, for example, Dutton argued is needed to provide empirical support for the patriarchical-dominance theory of partner violence, and which his review of the research found was virtually absent (Dutton 1994).

METHODS FOR THIS PAPER

Samples

(Insert Table A about here)

This paper presents results for 3,950 students from the 14 sites listed in Table A. As explained above, the data were gathered using procedures reviewed by and approved by the boards for protection of human subjects at each of these universities. The purpose of the study and the students right to not participate were explained orally as well as in printed form at the beginning of each session. Participants were told that the questionnaire asked about their attitudes, beliefs, and experiences they may have had, and that the questionnaire includes questions on sensitive issues, including sexual relationships. They were assured of anonymity and confidentiality. A debriefing form was given to each participant as they left. The form explained the study in more detail and provided names and telephone numbers of area mental health services and community resources such as services for battered women. Although 3,950 students completed the questionnaire, the N’s for the analyses in this paper are always smaller because not all students were in a current or recent dating relationship, and because, as in other surveys, not everyone answered every question. Indeed, to respect the privacy and the voluntary nature of participation the instructions emphasized that respondents were free to omit any question they did not wish to answer.

The completed questionnaires were scanned for aberrant response patterns such as marking the identical answer category for an entire series of questions, or an implausibly high frequency of rare events, such as 25 instances of attacking a partner with a knife or gun. The few questionnaires with an aberrant response pattern were removed from the sample. The most severe problem of this type occurred at a university where, instead of the usual silence, students exclaimed and joked about the questions. Examination of the data showed that about a quarter of the questionnaires at this university had aberrant response patterns. Consequently, it was decided to not use any of the data from that site.

Measures Of Intimate Partner Violence

The CTS2. Physical assault and sexual coercion were measured by the revised Conflict Tactics Scales or CTS2 (Straus, Hamby, Boney-McCoy, and Sugarman 1996). The original CTS has been used in more than one hundred studies over the past 25 years and has demonstrated reliability and validity (Archer 1999; Straus 1990). This paper will use subscale scores that cover any assault and any sexual coercion, and also subscale scores for “severe” Physical Assault and for “threatened” use of force and actual use of force to coerce sex.

The CTS asks respondents how many times they committed any of the acts in the past year and how many times their partner had done so. This provides data on both perpetration and victimization. However, because of space limitations, the results in this paper are restricted to perpetration. The response categories are: Once in the past year, Twice in the past year, 3-5 times in the past year, 6-10 times in the past year, 11-20 times in the past year, More than 20 times in the past year, Not in the past year, but it did happen before, This has never happened.

The CTS was designed to provide scores for different levels of severity in the sense of risk of injury to the victim. The difference between the CTS2 score for “minor” and “severe” assaults is similar to the legal distinction between “simple” and “aggravated” assault. The differences between the CTS2 scores for minor sexual coercion and the scores for use of threats and use of force are similar to recent revisions of rape statutes in the USA which specify levels of sexual assault.

Physical Assault. The difference between the CTS subscales for minor and severe assault is similar to the legal distinction in US criminal law between a simple and aggravated assault. The specific items to measure assault are:

Minor Assault

Pushed or shoved; Grabbed, Slapped

Threw something at partner;

Twisted arm or hair

Severe Assault:

Punched or hit

Kicked

Choked

Slammed against wall

Beat up

Burned or scalded;

Used knife or gun on partner

Respondents were asked how many times they had committed any of the physical assault behavior items in the past year. The alpha coefficients of reliability for the Physical Assault (Total score) for the samples in this paper ranged from ?? to ?? with a mean of ??

Sexual Coercion. Sexual coercion is defined as behavior intended to compel the partner to engage in unwanted sexual activity. The sexual coercion scale covers a range of coercive acts, from verbal insistence to physical force. The specific items to measure sexual coercion are:

Minor

Made my partner have sex without a condom

Insisted on sex when my partner did not want to (but did not use physical force)

Insisted my partner have oral or anal sex (but did not use physical force)

Threat

Used threats to make my partner have oral or anal sex

Used threats to make my partner have sex

Force

Used force (like hitting, holding down, or using a weapon) to make my partner have oral or anal sex

Used force (like hitting, holding down, or using a weapon) to make my partner have sex

Measures Of Respondent Characteristics

Table A shows selected characteristics of the respondents at these 14 sites.

Gender. Males were coded as 1 and females were coded 2. About two out of three students in the sample are female. The predominance of females occurred because most of the classes in which the questionnaire was administered were courses in psychology and sociology. However, there is also considerable variation. For example, in the Portuguese sample only 40% are female.

Socioeconomic Status (SES). A socioeconomic status scale was created for each site using three variables: years of education completed by the student’s father and mother and family income. To create a scale that measures the SES of the student relative to others at his or her university, these three variables were transformed to Z scores and summed. The sum was transformed to a Z score. Thus, within each site, the scale measures SES as the number of standard deviation units each student is above or below the mean of their site.

Social Desirability Scale. Research that uses self-report data needs to take into account the minimization of socially undesirable behavior by respondents. This study used the Social Desirability scale of the Personal And Relationships Profile (Straus, Hamby, Boney-McCoy, and Sugarman 1999; Straus and Mouradian 1999). This is a 13-item scale adapted from Reynolds short form of the Crowe Marlowe social desirability scale (Reynolds 1982). The scale measures the degree to which a respondent tends to avoid admitting undesirable behavior, such as partner assault and other forms of crime. The scale is intended to measure things that are slightly undesirable but true of everyone. The higher the social desirability score the less likely the respondent is to disclose undesirable information. The theoretical range of the social desirability scale is from 13 to 52. For this sample, the scores ranged from 18 to 54, with a mean of 34.2 and a SD of 4.8. The site-to-site differences were not large, but because they are almost statistically significant (F = 17.36, p .059), it was decided to control for score on the social desirability scale.

Age. The students ranged in age from 18 to 40. The mean was 21.9, but there were two sites where the students were significantly younger (Juarez, Mexico and New Hampshire, USA). It is well established that the younger a couple, the more likely there is to be violence in the relationship (Stets and Straus 1989). Because the sites varied significantly in age, this variable was controlled in the analysis of site-to-site differences in violence against a partner.

Relationship Length. Although eight percent of the students had been in the relationship they described in the questionnaire a month or less, many more (34%) had been together for two or more years. Thus, the median number of months was 13 and mean almost 14. Because the nature of a relationship can change over time, it was important to control for this variable when comparing the 14 sites.

Mode Of Analysis For Violence Rates

A 2 by 14 analysis of covariance was used to determine if there were significant differences between the 14 sites, and between male and female students, in physical assault and sexual coercion of dating partners, and to test for Gender X Site interactions. The ANCOVA controlled for the age of the respondent, length of the relationships, social desirability scale score, and socioeconomic status scale score. All means presented in this paper have been adjusted to control for those variables and for the sex of the respondent.

PSYCHOMETRIC RESULTS FOR THE CTS2

Because of space limitations, the psychometric data in this paper focuses on the physical assault and sexual coercion scales of the Revised Conflict Tactics Scales or CTS2. Future papers will report results for the other scales in the CTS2 for the Personal and Relationships profile.

Reliability

(Insert Table B about here)

Physical Assault. The analysis of the combined file for respondents from all sites found an Alpha coefficient of .90 for the Physical Assault Scale. The coefficients for each site in Table B are also high. Only one site had a reliability below .70 (Swiss German Alpha = .65) and most were .85 or higher. For male respondents, the alpha is .?? and for female ..??

Sexual Coercion. The Sexual Coercion scale has an alpha of .82 for the merged sample, which although high, is lower than the alpha for the Physical Assault scale. Table C shows that the Sexual Coercion scale alphas for the individual sites were also lower than the alpha’s Physical Assault scale. Utah, USA had the lowest alpha (.52). All others were .75 or higher. The alpha for males in this sample was ?? and ?? for females.

Correlation With Social Desirability Scale

(Insert Table C about here)

As pointed out in the methods section, differences between individuals, between sites and between men and women in reports of perpetration of physical and sexual assault could reflect difference in willingness to disclose these crimes rather than differences in actual perpetration rates. To investigate this possibility, the correlation of each CTS scale with the Social Desirability response bias scale was computed. The column in Table C for the Physical Assault scale shows that, as expected, the higher the Social Desirability scale score, the less likely the respondent was to report having perpetrated a physical assault. However, as in previous studies of the CTS, most of the correlations are quite low (Sugarman and Hotaling 1996). Three of the correlations are under .10. Even for the three sites with the highest correlations, the coefficients are -.25, which means that only five percent of the variance in the Physical Assault scale is explained by differences in tendency to disclose socially undesirable information.

The correlation in Table C of the Sexual Coercion scale with the Social Desirability scale score is similar to the correlations with Physical Assault, but they tend to be somewhat lower. Thus, social desirability response bias does not seem to be an important threat to the validity of the results to be presented below. Nevertheless, to be on the safe side, the Social Desirability scale was included as a control variable.

Correlation Of Assault And Injury

PHYSICAL ASSAULT

Physical Assault Overall

(Insert Table D and Figures 1 and 2 about here)

Site Differences. Table D gives the overall rate of physical assaults by students in each of the 14 sites. Some of the differences are large, and this is reflected by the significant main effect for site in the analysis of covariance (F = 6.641, p .027). Seven sites differed significantly from the mean of all the sites: Three were significantly higher than the average of all sites Texas, Mexican Americans, Juarez, Mexico, and Hong Kong, China. Four had significantly lower rates of partner assault than the overall mean: Hamilton, Canada, Portugal, and Utah, USA. At this early stage in the project, we have not yet had time to investigate possible reasons for these differences.

Gender Differences. Using the entire sample of 3,086 students, there was only a one-point difference between male and female students in the percent who assaulted a partner in the previous 12 months (27.7 % of males and 28.7% of females) and this difference was not statistically significant (F = 0.21, p= .647). These rates are after adjustment for age, length of relationship, socioeconomic status, and social desirability response bias.

Figure 1 shows that at four of the sites, women had slightly higher rates of perpetration than men (New Hampshire, USA; Juarez, Mexico; Israel; and Swiss German). At two of the sites, women had assault rates that were ten or more percentage points higher than the men at their site (Hong Kong, China, and Hamilton, Canada). These differences resulted in an almost significant Gender X Site interaction effect (F = 1.606; p .054). These results showing similar or higher rates of assaulting a partner are consistent with a large body of research on gender differences in IPV among students (Straus 1999; Sugarman and Hotaling 1989). A detailed analysis of gender differences in physical assault in four of the International Dating Violence Study sites is provided elsewhere (Straus and Ramirez 2002).

Severe Physical Assault

Most of the assaults in the overall measure were relatively minor attacks, such as slapping or throwing things at a partner. The Severe Assault subscale of the CTS permits comparing men and women and comparing the sites in respect to more severe attacks, such as punching and attacks with weapons.

Site Differences. The rates of severe assault at each site are in Table D. There was an overall significant site-to-site differences in perpetration of severe assaults. However, only one site was significantly higher than the mean of all the sites: The rate for Juarez, Mexico of 15.9% was 64% greater than the overall mean of 9.7%.

Gender Differences. As expected, the rate of severe attacks on a partner was much lower by both men and women. We also expected that severe attacks by women would be even lower. But, contrary to our expectations, there was little difference between men and women in severe assaults. The men had a perpetration rate of 9.5% and the women a rate of 8.8% (F = 0.39, p .843). Differences in perpetration of severe assaults by male and female students at each site are shown in Figure 2. The symmetry between men and women in perpetration of severe assaults did not differ enough from site to site to produce a significant interaction effect (F = 1.606, p .76).

SEXUAL COERCION

Sexual Coercion Overall

Table D gives the overall sexual coercion rate for each site, and the rates for use of threats and for use of force to coerce sexual acts.

(Insert Figures 3, 4, and 5 about here)

Gender Differences. The overall rate of sexual coercion was 39.9% for perpetration by males, 18.6% for perpetration by females, The male rate is 1.7 times greater for perpetration by women (F = 39.66, p <.001). Gender differences for each site are shown in Figure 3. There was a significant Gender X Site interaction (F = 2.05; p .014) because at some sites perpetration by women was about the same as by men (Hong Kong; Swiss; German; and Utah, USA). All three of these sites had relatively low overall rates of sexual coercion, so the nearly equal rates occur because the rates of sexual coercion by men at these sites was low compared to the other sites in this study. Despite the significantly lower rate of sexual coercion by women students, in absolute terms, the rate of perpetration by women is high.

Sexual Coercion By Threat

Site Differences. Surprisingly, there was not a significant difference between sites in the overall rate of sexual coercion (F = 1.42, p .142). However, one site, Juarez, Mexico had a significantly higher rate than the mean of all the sites.

Gender Differences. Although the overall rate of sexual coercion was high for both men and women, the overall rate refers mostly to the less severe acts (see measures section, above). For more severe coercive acts men may exceed the rate by women to a much greater extent. This expectation was not supported when the criterion of severity is a threat. The overall rate for use of threats to coerce sex was 3.8% by men and 2.2% by women. Thus the male rate is 1.7 times greater, which is exactly the same ratio as for the overall rate (F = 4.733, p .03).

Figure 4 shows the gender differences for each site. The greater perpetration by men was present at all sites except Brazil and the Swiss French site, where the rates for men and women were essentially the same. The Gender X Site interaction was not significant (F = .692, p .77). Despite the non-significant interaction, there were three sites where male use of threats was extremely high and much higher than the rate for females (USA, Texas- Non-Mexican; Winnipeg; Canada; and Montreal, Canada).

Physically Forced Sex

Site Differences. Although inspection of the rates in the last column of Table D shows what seem to be some large differences between the sites, the overall F test for Site was not significant (F = 1.419, p .142). Consistent with the lack of a site main effect, there was only one site (Texas, Mexican Americans) which differed significantly from the mean of all the sites (an adjusted rate of 10.1%).

Gender Differences. The gender differences in perpetration of physically forced sex are consistent with other studies in showing a rate that is 2.6 times greater for men than for women (4.6% of the men in this study and 1.8 percent of the women, F = 12.768, p <.001). However, a rate of 1.8% of women physically forcing sex is both puzzling and if correct, disturbing. Although there was not a significant Gender X Site interaction, the same three sites where male use of threats was much higher than female were also much higher in the rate of men physically forcing sex on a female partner (Texas, USA, Non-Mexican; Winnipeg, Canada; and Montreal, Canada)

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

This paper presented preliminary results on the prevalence of physical assault and sexual coercion by 3,086 university students at 14 sites in nine countries. These are the first data to become available from the International Dating Violence Study. At this time, 34 countries are participating in the study.

Psychometric Analyses

Reliability. Analyses of the physical assault and sexual coercion scales show that: they have acceptable to high alpha coefficients of reliability in all but one of the sites. The one site that has a low alpha is one of the sites in the USA. Because other USA sites, and almost all the non-USA sites, have high reliabilities, this analysis of the first 14 sites in the International Dating Violence study suggests that the instruments will be appropriate despite the great diversity among the 34 nations planned for this study.

Low confounding with social desirability. The scores on a social desirability response bias scale which measures the tendency of a respondent to avoid disclosing undesirable behavior did not differ importantly from site to site or between men and women. As expected, the higher the score on the social desirability scale, the lower the rate of physical assault and sexual coercion, indicating that the social desirability scale is operating as intended. However, these correlations were not high enough to be an important threat to validity. In addition, the correlation of the social desirability scale with the measures of physical and sexual violence did not differ much between men and women or between sites.

(Insert Figure ?? about here)

Construct and discriminant validity. Figure ?? shows that the higher the percent of students at a university who reporting assaulting a partner, the higher the percent of students at the university who were injurded. This can be taken as evidence that the scores on the physical assault scale are grounded in reality and therefore provide a start toward establishing the cross-national construct validity of the measures used for this study. Confidence in these measures is also increased by the finding that scores on the sexual coercion scale are not related to physical injury. Because the type of injuries measured by the Injury scale rarely occur as a result of sexual coercion, the absence of a correlation, provides a start toward establishing discriminant validity (Campbell and Fiske 1959).

Physical Assault

The rate of physical assault for the 3,086 students in this sample was 28.2%. This is consistent with a large number of studies of Canadian and US students. As in previous studies, most of the assaults on dating partners by students are relatively minor, such as slapping and shoving a partner in anger. The rate of more dangerous assaults, such as punching, choking, and attacks with weapons was much lower (9.7%). However, this is still an alarmingly high rate.

Site Differences. There were large differences between sites, with the percentage of offenders ranging from 16 to 51 percent. The former is considerably lower, and the latter is somewhat above, what has usually been found in Canada and the USA. But even the lowest of these rates indicates that in all these diverse cultural settings a substantial percent of university students are physically abusive to their partners. Moreover, this applies to both male and female students.

Gender Differences. Male and female students were remarkably similar in the proportion who physically assaulted a partner (27.6% of men and 28.7% of women students). The similarity in rates also applies to severe assaults (9.5% by men and 9.8% by women).

Sexual Coercion

The 24.7% rate of sexual coercion found for the students in this study is similar to the rate for physical assaults. Most of the sexual coercion was insisting on having sex when the partner did not want to. However, the rates of using threats to obtain sex (3%) and the rate of physically forcing sex (3.2%) are alarmingly high.

Site differences. The differences between the sites with the lowest and the highest rate of sexual coercion was greater than the differences between sites in physical assault. Despite that, there were high rates of sexual coercion at all sites.

Gender Differences. The rate of perpetration of sexual coercion by men tended to be almost double the rate for women: 30.9% by men versus 18.6% by women, or 1.7 time higher by men using the overall measure. This measure included the least severe form of sexual coercion – insisting on sex when the partner did not want to. For use of threats, the rates were much lower (3.8% of men and 2.2% of women) but the gender difference was about the same. For use of physical force, the male perpetration rate was 4.6% and the female perpetration rate was 1.8%, which is 2.5 times higher rate of perpetration by men. Although the male rates are at least double the female rates, these results also show that a substantial proportion of women engaged in sexual coercion. These high rates of sexual coercion by women are consistent with a number of other recent studies ((Anderson 1998; Anderson and Struckman-Johnson 1998; Fiebert and Tucci 1998) Fiebert 2000 bibliography??)

Conclusions

Both the psychometric and the substantive results reported in this article suggest that the methods used in the International Dating Violence Study are promising. The data from the first 14 sites in nine countries reveals both important differences between sites and important similarities across sites. Perhaps the most important similarity is the high rate of violence against dating partners by both male and female students in all the sites. Even the sites that had lower rates relative to other sites, in absolute terms had a high rate of physical assault and sexual coercion including the use of physical force to coerce sex.

The percentages in this article can be converted to rates per thousand in order to compare them with the rates found by the US National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) for respondents age 20-24 (the age group for NCVS that is closest to the university student data). The most recent NCVS rate for physical assault was 38 per thousand (Rennison 2002); whereas the physical assault rate for the students in this study was 282 per thousand, or over seven times higher. The most recent NCVS rate for rape and sexual assault was 2.4 per thousand, compared to 32 per thousand for physically forced sex by the students in this sample, which is over thirteen times greater. These are far from exact comparisons because of differences in the methods used by the International Dating Violence study and the NCVS. The differences in methods and samples could either lessen or increase the amount by which physical and sexual assault of student dating partners exceeds the rate for similar aged persons in the general population. If it were possible to adjust the rates to take into account the differences in methods, and if the adjustment resulted in decreasing rather than increasing the difference by half, that would still be a physical assault rate for students that is three and a half times greater and a sexual assault rate that is six and a half times greater. These statistics therefore document internationally what has been known for a long time – that intimate partner violence is by far the most prevalent type of violent crime.

These results suggest that a substantial percent of university students in a number of diverse societies are physically abusive to their partners. The extent to which this applies to students in all 34 countries for which data will eventually become available remains to be determined. Even more important, the etiology of this high rate of violence among a generally privileged section of the population needs to be understood. That is the ultimate focus of the International Dating Violence Study.

The investigation of etiological theories or risk factors for partner violence will use both individual-level data and societal-level data. Individual-level data is available for each site from the Personal And Relationships Profile or PRP (Straus, Hamby, Boney-McCoy, and Sugarman 1999; Straus and Mouradian 1999). The PRP measures 22 concepts, each of which was included because there is evidence that it is a risk factor for partner violence in the USA. Some of the PRP scales measure personal characteristics of the partner who completed the PRP, such as Depression and Antisocial Personality, and some measure characteristics of the relationship such as Communication Problems and Dominance. The extent to which the 22 PRP variables are associated with partner violence will be examined for students at each site.

The societal level data will come from a variety of sources such as the International Crime Survey (??), the ?? and ??? (patriarchy). These data can be used to examine many aspects of the relation between social context and partner violence, including extent to which site-to-site differences in the rate of partner violence is linked to the degree of male-dominance in the society and to the rate of other types of crime.

These data will be used to test crime data, for example will be used to investigate the relationship of national crime rates to violence against a partner. If violence against partners is a unique phenomenon that grows out of male-dominance and a patriarchical social system, there should be little or no correlation with crime rates.

Table A. Characteristics Of Students By Site

Site		N	% Female	Mean Age	Relation Length	Social Desirability

	NORTH AMERICA
	USA New Hampshire	773	67.9%	19.8	11.1	33.5
	USA Texas Mex Amer	270	58.1%	24.6	15.7	35.5
	USA Texas Non-Mex	190	55.3%	23.3	14.6	33.5
	USA Utah	196	62.2%	21.8	14.6	33.5
	Canada Hamilton	316	85.7%	21.5	14.6	33.4
	Canada Montreal	346	76.8%	23.6	16.4	34.4
	Canada Winnipeg	143	87.4%	21.9	14.5	32.9
	LATIN AMERICA
	Brazil	244	68.3%	20.7	13.1	34.3
	Mexico Juarez	310	79.0%	20.8	12.6	37.1
	EUROPE
	Portugal	208	38.9%	22.0	15.3	35.3
	Swiss French	304	68.1%	23.7	15.7	33.2
	Swiss German	207	68.0%	20.7	13.4	34.9
	ASIA & MIDDLE EAST
	China Hong Kong	235	60.4%	21.4	12.0	33.3
	Israel	208	68.3%	22.0	15.3	35.3

	Total	3950	66.7%	22.0	14.0	34.3

Table B. Alpha Coefficients Of Reliability for Physical Assault

And Sexual Coercion

SITE		N	Physical Assault	Sexual Coercion

	NORTH AMERICA
	USA New Hampshire	770	.86	.78
	USA Texas Mex Amer	220	.91	.85
	USA Texas Non-Mex	153	.94	.86
	USA Utah	185	.78	.52
	Canada Hamilton	272	.91	.81
	Canada Montreal	303	.88	.79
	Canada Winnipeg	121	.91	.86
	LATIN AMERICA
	Brazil	154	.94	.86
	Mexico Juarez	259	.84	.81
	EUROPE
	Portugal	150	.73	A
	Swiss French	204	.85	.75
	Swiss German	125	.65	A
	ASIA & MIDDLE EAST
	China Hong Kong	186	.90	.87
	Israel	150	.73	A

	Total	2,304	.90	.82

Table C. Correlation Of CTS Scales With Social Desirability

Response Bias Scale.

SITE		N	Physical Assault	Sexual Coercion

	NORTH AMERICA
	USA New Hampshire	773	-.21**	-.12**
	USA Texas Mex Amer	231	-.13*	-.23*
	USA Texas Non-Mex	158	-.15*	-.08
	USA Utah	174	-.25**	-.08
	Canada Hamilton	292	-.21**	-.14**
	Canada Montreal	307	-.25**	-.18**
	Canada Winnipeg	122	.01	-.15
	LATIN AMERICA
	Brazil	155	-.13	-.20**
	Mexico Juarez	271	-.25**	-.09
	EUROPE
	Portugal	152	-.03	-.19*
	Swiss French	214	-.20**	-.17**
	Swiss German	131	-.09	-.07
	ASIA & MIDDLE EAST
	China Hong Kong	186	-.17**	-.09
	Israel	152	-.03	-.19*

	All sites	3383	-.16**	-.14**

Table D. Prevalence of Physical Assaults And Sexual Coercion Of Dating Partners At 14 Sites

		Physical Assault		Sexual Coercion
Site	N	Overall	Severe	Overall	Threat	Force

NORTH AMERICA
USA New Hampshire	716	29.1	8.5	21.6	2.7	3.1
USA Texas Mex Amer	220	38.4	13.4	32.5	4.2	6.3
USA Texas Non-Mex	153	30.1	12.9	32.7	6.1	4.4
USA Utah	168	19.5	6.1	13.7	.5	1.6
Canada Hamilton	248	16.1	5.8	26.0	2.9	4.1
Canada Montreal	288	26.1	11.9	27.4	3.7	3.1
Canada Winnipeg	114	35.1	13.6	29.3	6.9	5.9
LATIN AMERICA
Brazil	149	21.7	5.9	41.6	2.1	1.0
Mexico Juarez	249	51.2	15.9	25.7	1.1	4.2
EUROPE
Portugal	141	20.0	7.1	23.0	2.9	1.5
Swiss French	201	28.6	7.1	26.2	1.9	2.8
Swiss German	123	23.8	6.9	16.4	2.6	1.1
ASIA & MIDDLE EAST
China Hong Kong	175	34.8	13.3	7.5	1.7	3.7
Israel	141	20.0	7.1	23.0	2.9	1.5

Total	3086	28.2	9.7	24.7	3.0	3.2

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