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41 Commentary Chitra Raghavan and Shuki J. Cohen What Is Domestic Violence and how Do We Measure It? We begin the book with one of the most fundamental questions in intimate partner violence (IPV) research: what is partner violence and how do we measure it? Both chapters in this section consider this same question, albeit from very different perspectives. Cook, Hamby, Stith, McCollum, and Mehne present a positivist measure development and psychometric study, whereas Serafim and Saffi obtain qualitative responses to open-ended questions. As such, commensurate with their different stances, both sets of authors differ in their general approaches and interpretive strategies. Cook and others present a thorough chapter that explicates the process of developing a measure to assess an important aspect of intimate partner dominance and aggression. The authors meticulously walk the reader through the various decisions associated with this measure and their rationale and provide a sensitive cost-benefit analysis of these decisions. First, the authors provide a clear definition of the construct of intimate partner dominance, along with its related constructs of intimate partner aggression and violence. They then operationalize their definitions by creating a set of reliable observable behaviors and attitudes. The emphasis on definitional boundaries and operationalization are the core tenets of positivist approaches to psychological measurement. The positivist approach is a venerable tradition of science as an art of measurement. Emphasizing measurement at every step of the way, the authors then tackle the question of how best to measure the particularly complicated construct of intimate partner dominance and the potential violence associated with it. Unlike, say, measuring depression, which focuses on the individual self, all measures of partner violence must first consider what constitutes a partnership— a task not as obvious as it seems. Indeed, in some countries one can be consid- 42 | What Is Domestic Violence? ered a partner only if the two individuals are legally married. In other countries a partner may be polyamorous with multiple spouses and of different biological sexes. Dating violence in countries where dating and or cohabiting is taboo or forbidden is, expectedly, an invisible phenomenon—underreported and unacknowledged . In contrast, in the United States, where cohabitation of unmarried partners is acceptable, dating violence has been identified as a significant problem. Thus, at the outset, the researchers must carefully define which aspect of partner violence they will measure. This point reemerges in a different fashion in the data of the twin chapter by Serafim and Saffi, which utilizes a radically different qualitative and nonpositivistic approach. After creating carefully worded questions, Cook and others determine the setting in which they are going to be delivered (e.g., paper-and-pencil self reports , semistructured questionnaires or open-ended interviews). Along this way, the authors also discuss what they are not measuring and what lies at the interface between the construct they want to focus on (e.g., dominance) and its neighboring constructs (e.g., physical and sexual intimate partner violence). Cook and others describe several interesting methodological challenges that arise in measuring dominance. The first pertains to the ubiquity of the topic in the discourse about partner violence, contrasted by almost complete lack of instruments to measure it. Dominance, as the authors state, is difficult to measure because it refers to a wide variety of tactics, attitudes, and behaviors that cannot always be observed directly. The construct is inherently dynamic, dealing with power exchanges, rather than with events in which particular behaviors are being enacted. As such, it has a strong subjective and interpretative quality. The behavioral patterns associated with this construct surface in small and seemingly unimportant events throughout the day and are not always felt when they happen but rather exert their damage through their cumulative effect within the context of a restricting, dominating, and disparaging relationship environment. Because of the seeming normalcy of each individual act, the dominated partners have difficulty identifying them, despite the palpable effect of their total sum. Cook and others approach these difficulties in two ways. First, they frame the questions they pose to their informants not as acts in a specific reference and time frame, but rather as a general characteristic of the partnership that may manifest in broad areas of the participant’s intimate life. Second, by using a combination of hypothetical scenarios and existing research on the subject, the authors arrive at a set of carefully worded items operationally tied to their definition of the dominance construct. The authors also obtain data from both the [3.17.154.171...

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