Validating the Concept of Abuse: Women's Perceptions of Defining Behaviors and the Effects of Emotional Abuse on Health Indicators

Peggy Jo Wagner

67 citations0/0 files storedArchives of Family Medicine

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Intimate Partner and Family Violence Child Abuse and Trauma Elder Abuse and Neglect

Abstract

OBJECTIVES: To validate the construct of abuse in 2 ways: first, to examine female patients' perceptions of abusive behaviors that are typically used in standardized abuse scales; and second, to determine health status symptom and medical utilization differences between women who report emotional abuse and women who are not abused. DESIGN: Cross-sectional interviews and medical record reviews. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Modified directions to the Conflict Tactics Scale were used to identify women's perceptions of abusive behaviors. Personal history of abuse was determined by self-report. Health status was measured using the Medical Outcomes Study Short-Form Health Survey-36 and medical services utilization was determined from medical records. The Wahler Physical Symptom Inventory was used to measure symptom experience. SETTING: Patients were interviewed in either a rural primary care practice or an urban medical university practice. PATIENTS: Four hundred seven women older than 18 years were interviewed. Half were from an urban and half from a rural setting. Sixty-four percent of the sample was black. RESULTS: Women saw more behaviors as abusive than are typically identified by the Conflict Tactics Scale and abused women identified more abusive behaviors than nonabused women. Significant health status differences were found between women who reported emotional abuse with no concurrent physical or sexual abuse and nonabused women on 7 of the 8 dimensions of the Short-Form Health Survey health status scales and on 25% of measured symptoms. CONCLUSIONS: These findings reflect the idea that women consider many behaviors to be abusive and that abused women perceive more behaviors as abusive than do nonabused women. Given that significant health status differences are shown between emotionally abused and nonabused women, emotional abuse can be viewed as a critical variable in patient health behavior.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 67 citations exist upstream.

References

1992The MOS 36-item short-form health survey (SF-36). I. Conceptual framework and item selection.1979Measuring Intrafamily Conflict and Violence: The Conflict Tactics (CT) Scales 1992Assessing for Abuse During Pregnancy 1995The “Battering Syndrome”: Prevalence and Clinical Characteristics of Domestic Violence in Primary Care Internal Medicine Practices 1992Primary care physicians' response to domestic violence. Opening Pandora's box 1995Domestic violence against women. Incidence and prevalence in an emergency department population 1992Prevalence of domestic violence in community practice and rate of physician inquiry.1992Inquiry about victimization experiences. A survey of patient preferences and physician practices

Cited by

2007Domestic Violence and Abuse, Health Status, and Social Functioning 2004Violence against Canadian Women 2007Partner Violence Screening in Rural Health Care Clinics 1999The Associations between Health and Domestic Violence in Older Women: Results of a Pilot Study 2011Is It Abuse? Deaf Female Undergraduates' Labeling of Partner Violence

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.