A typology of family violence was derived from the reports of 181 adolescent family members in intact rural and urban families sampled in the Midwest. Discriminant analysis was used in an attempt to differentiate nonviolent, verbally violent, and both verbally and physically violent families as a function of variables said to be significant predictors of family violence in a decade review by Gelles. Results indicate that the predictor variables fail to account consistently for differences among the three groups. As Gelles has suggested, a “woozle effect” may be operating in which frequent citations of relatively poor studies mislead us into thinking we know more about the causes of family violence than we really do.
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