The Development of a Measure of Psychological Maltreatment of Women by Their Male Partners

Abstract

This study describes the initial development of a scale of measurement of psychological maltreatment of women by their male partners. The initial version of the scale was administered to 407 men and 207 women at intake into a domestic violence program. All 58 items of the scale were endorsed by a large enough number of subjects to warrant inclusion in the final instrument. Factor analysis revealed a similar factor structure for the men and women, with dominance-isolation and emotional-verbal abuse factors emerging from the analysis. Intracouple reliability for each item of the scale was examined for the subset of men and women who were cohabiting couples (n = 28). Unsurprisingly, the agreement of men’s and women’s reports was low, though the scores on the domination-isolation subscale were significantly correlated.