Ethnocultural Influences on Women's Experiences of and Responses to Intimate Partner Violence, Los Angeles and Orange Counties, California, United States, 2014-2017 (ICPSR 37097)

Version Date: Apr 28, 2021

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Principal Investigator(s):
Mindy Beth Mechanic, California State University, Fullerton; Courtney Ahrens, California State University, Long Beach

https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR37097.v1

Version V1

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Summary

Research about ethnocultural influences on women's experience of and response to intimate partner violence (IPV) is scarce, contributing to culturally incongruent processes that may deter some survivors from engaging with community systems. To fill this gap in the literature, this project examined the ways that cultural beliefs and contexts serve as a lens through which European-American, Mexican-American, Korean-American, and Vietnamese-American women experience and respond to IPV in their lives. Community-based recruitment techniques were used to recruit female survivors of intimate partner violence from the four target ethnic groups. Data collection included qualitative interviews (n = 112) and online surveys (n = 193) with survivors of intimate partner violence as well as focus groups with service providers (n = 37). While there were many shared experiences across survivors from the four ethnic groups, important differences in survivors' interpretation of abuse, strategies for managing the abuse, and help-seeking experiences did emerge. These differences have important implications for the development of culturally competent prevention and intervention strategies for survivors from different ethnic groups.

This collection only contains the online survey data. The focus group and individual interview data will be released at a future date.

Citation

Mechanic, Mindy Beth, and Ahrens, Courtney. Ethnocultural Influences on Women’s Experiences of and Responses to Intimate Partner Violence, Los Angeles and Orange Counties, California, United States, 2014-2017. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2021-04-28. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR37097.v1

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Funding

United States Department of Justice. Office of Justice Programs. National Institute of Justice (2013-MU-CX-0038)

Subject Terms

Geographic Coverage

Restrictions

Access to these data is restricted. Users interested in obtaining these data must complete a Restricted Data Use Agreement, specify the reason for the request, and obtain IRB approval or notice of exemption for their research.

Distributor(s)

Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
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Time Period(s)

2014-01-01 -- 2017-12-31

Date of Collection

2015-01-01 -- 2017-12-31

Data Collection Notes

  1. Identifiable information such as IP addresses and Qualtrics IDs have been redacted to protect respondent privacy. Only those surveys that met the screening criteria and passed quality control inspections (see response rate section for more information) have been included in this final dataset. Some variables have missing data resulting from a merging of two different versions of the survey (see study design section for more information) and from user error.

  2. DS1 (Survivors Survey Data) is the main survey dataset, including raw and derived items. DS2 (Standardized Scale Means by Abuse Type Cluster) and DS3 (Standardized Scale Means by Health Symptoms Cluster) are supplemental datasets with Z-scores for selected scales. For further details on scale construction, please refer to the P.I. codebook.

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Study Purpose

Four specific research aims guided this study:

  1. To understand how ethnocultural beliefs affect the nature and interpretation of co-occurring violence in women's lives.
  2. To understand how ethnocultural beliefs affect abuse-related mental and physical health.
  3. To understand how ethnocultural contexts influence strategic responses to violence.
  4. To understand the linkages between women's experiences of violence, health outcomes, and willingness to engage with the criminal justice system.

Study Design

This study used a cross-sectional, correlational design with community-based convenience sampling. The original recruitment design included screening for intimate partner violence (IPV) by nurses at low-income community health clinics, but low response rates prompted an expansion of recruitment efforts after the first 6 months. From that point on, flyers, pamphlets, and in-person presentations were used to recruit participants from community based organizations (e.g., social service organizations, health clinics, cultural organizations, legal clinics), community events (e.g., health fairs, swap meets, neighborhood and cultural events), and local businesses (e.g., coffee shops, nail salons, child care facilities). To ensure wide coverage of recruitment efforts, researchers divided the Los Angeles and Orange County metropolitan area into nearly 100 tracts covering 51 cities. Recruitment materials were then either hand delivered or mailed to over 1,500 establishments in these areas, and newspaper advertisements were placed in eight different local and ethnic newspapers. All recruitment materials invited adult women from the specified ethnicities to participate in a study about relationship conflict.

Survey recruitment materials invited women to participate in the online survey for which they received a $20 gift certificate to Amazon.com. Interested participants were then guided to a website that allowed participants to take the survey in English, Spanish, Korean, or Vietnamese. The first page of the survey contained screening questions. Only those participants who met the screening criteria were allowed to proceed to the online survey itself, which contained 15 standardized scales assessing survivors' experiences of abuse, help-seeking, and recovery.

The original protocol combined both the scaled and qualitative questions for in-person interviews. It was revised after the first 23 interviews due to length (participants needed 3-4 hours to complete), splitting the quantitative measures and qualitative questions into separate protocols. After consulting with community partners, the researchers decided to present the scales as an online survey instead of as part of the interview. While the scaled items themselves did not change, additional scales and quality control items were added at a later point, and the presentation format changed. This final revised version of the online survey took approximately 1 hour for survivors to complete.

Sample

The survey sample consisted of 193 respondents whose surveys were deemed to be complete, consistent, and qualified for the study (see response rate section below for more information). This final sample includes 50 European-American, 62 Mexican-American, 42 Korean-American, and 39 Vietnamese-American IPV survivors. All participants were over the age of 18 and had experienced at least instance of fear, physical abuse, or sexual abuse at the hands of an intimate partner in the past 5 years.

Time Method

Cross-sectional

Universe

The sample consisted of adult women of European-, Mexican-, Korean-, or Vietnamese-American backgrounds who responded affirmatively to screening questions about being afraid of their romantic partner or experiencing at least one form of physical or sexual abuse at the hands of their romantic partner in the last 5 years.

Unit(s) of Observation

Individual

Data Type(s)

Mode of Data Collection

Description of Variables

The survey data is comprised of 743 variables from 15 standardized scales for which scale scores have been calculated in several different ways (see the Scales section for a complete list). Variables derived from the raw scale items include sums, means, Z-scores, ever in lifetime vs. past year occurrences, and binary variables (e.g. a factor was important/not important in making decisions about the relationship). Demographic variables include age, ethnic identity, country of birth, language of interview, education, race, marital status, relationship length, household income, if living with other household members, number of children, and children's ages. Partner demographics provided are race, education, age, and country of birth.

To identify patterns of abuse and health symptomology within the sample, the researchers used a combination of hierarchical and iterative cluster analysis techniques. The final abuse cluster variable consisted of three groups based on abuse severity: (1) controlling relationship (high levels of coercive and psychological abuse, low levels of other types), (2) widespread violence (high levels for all abuse types), and (3) unhealthy relationship (low levels of all abuse types). The final health cluster variable also consisted of three groups based on symptom severity: (1) moderate, (2) high, and (3) low.

Response Rates

A total of 634 people accessed the online survey. Of these, 219 did not meet the screening criteria (and therefore did not make it past the screening page), 32 of the surveys were incomplete (defined as not completing any of the abuse scales which appear in the first 1/3 of the survey), 75 were deemed to be substantially inconsistent (defined as numerous contradictions in repeated factual questions such as age, gender, ethnicity, relationship status, and/or failure to correctly answer quality control questions such as the current year), 115 were duplicate data (most of which contained identical response patterns that were submitted at 10 minute intervals on one particular day). The remaining 193 survey responses were deemed to be complete and consistent; these are the surveys that are used in the final analyses.

Presence of Common Scales

  1. Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure (MEIM) (Phinney, 1992)
  2. Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-15) Somatic Symptoms Inventory (Kroenke et al., 2002)
  3. Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) Depression Inventory (Kroenke and Spitzer, 2002)
  4. Trauma Symptom Inventory (TSI) Dissociation Scale (Briere, 1995)
  5. Revised Attitudes Toward Wife Abuse Scale (Yoshioka et al., 2001)
  6. Psychological Maltreatment of Women Short Form (PMWS-F) (Tolman, 1995)
  7. Coercive Control Scale (Dutton et al., 2005)
  8. Short Form of the Revised Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS2S) (Straus and Douglas, 2004)
  9. Revised Stalking Behavior Checklist (SBC) (Coleman, 1997)
  10. Trauma Appraisal Questionnaire (DePrince et al., 2010)
  11. Posttraumatic Diagnostic Scale (Foa et al., 1997)
  12. Intimate Partner Violence Strategies Index (Goodman et al., 2003)
  13. Decision to Leave Scale (Hendy et al., 2003)
  14. Legal and Medical Secondary Victimization Scales (Campbell, 2005)
  15. Social Reactions Questionnaire Short Form (Ullman, 2000)

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Original Release Date

2021-04-28

Version History

2021-04-28 ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:

  • Performed consistency checks.
  • Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes.

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Notes

  • The public-use data files in this collection are available for access by the general public. Access does not require affiliation with an ICPSR member institution.

  • One or more files in this data collection have special restrictions. Restricted data files are not available for direct download from the website; click on the Restricted Data button to learn more.