Uncovering Gender Differences in the Use of Marital Violence: The Effect of Methodology

Abstract

Since the publication of large, representative, structured questionnaire surveys suggesting that women were equally or more likely than men to hit their partners, there has been considerable debate over women's use of violence in marriage. This debate has focused on the methods used to study marital violence. On the one hand, it has been suggested that this female-perpetrated marital violence is a genuine problem which has been uncovered by the rigorous use of representative samples and quantitative methods of data collection. On the other hand, it has been suggested that the use of methods which simply measure acts of physical aggression and ignore the context and meaning of any violence results in the failure to demonstrate very obvious differences between male and female-perpetrated marital violence. This study uses a community sample of couples to show that, although women may hit their partners more often than men do, if context and meaning is included in the assessment of violence, male violence is considerably more likely than female violence to be dangerous and threatening. The data presented also demonstrate that male-perpetrated marital violence is likely to lead to serious injury and greatly increases women's risk of anxiety, whereas female-perpetrated marital violence has neither of these consequences for men.