these conflicts. These rates refer to the use of violence
at any time in the marriage and may include both uni-
lateral and reciprocal violence. Straus reported approx-
imately equal perpetration rates by gender. This
common measure enables some direct comparison
between these surveys.
Kennedy and Dutton used a combination of face-to-
face meeting and random-digit dialing techniques to
survey 1,045 residents in Alberta, Canada, leading to a
comparison of American and Canadian rates of wife
assault. The “minor” violence rates for the two coun-
tries are virtually identical, but the American “severe
violence” rates were higher than the Canadian rates.
By way of comparison with these North American
data, Kim and Cho reported that the Korean intimate
partner violence rate was 37.5% for wife assault (any
violence) in the preceding year versus 11.6% reported
by Straus et al. In 1985, Fumagai and Straus found a
lifetime incidence of wife assault in Japan of 58.7%
versus 22% in the United States.
Fals-Stewart, Birchler, and Kelley asked 104 men
in a spousal violence treatment program and their
partners to keep a weekly diary identifying days of
physical aggression and a daily CTS checklist for vio-
lence. Male-to-female agreement on “violence days”
was better after treatment than before, perhaps
because couples were aware of tracking. Interestingly,
the women were violent on more days than the men,
regardless of whose report was read.
Moffitt et al. confirmed Straus’s point in one of the
best methodological studies of intimate violence to
date, the Dunedin study. When asked about “assault
victimization,” they found that respondents reported
rates of male violence that were much higher than the
rates of female violence, and both rates were quite
low. When they asked the same respondents about
“relationships with partners,” the rates reported by
both genders were much higher and equivalent.Criticisms
Some criticisms have been made about the CTS:
(a) the CTS ignores the context in which the violence
occurred, (b) differences in gender size between men
and women make acts scored the same on the CTS
quite different in reality, (c) impression management
or social desirability factors may preclude people
from answering the CTS accurately, and (d) the CTS
queries violence occurring in a conflict and may miss
“out of the blue” violence.Straus’s rejoinders to these criticisms are as fol-
lows. First, the assessment of context should be done
separately because there are so many context vari-
ables that they could not all be included on the CTS.
The CTS is designed in such a way that any special
set of context questions can be easily added. Second,
a similar problem, Straus notes, is that repeated slap-
ping is highly abusive and dangerous but gets counted
as Minor Violence on the CTS. Straus argues that
while it is possible to weight actions by differences in
size between perpetrator and victim, or to construct
an upper limit after which slapping gets counted as
Severe Violence, such weightings have rarely led to
changes in research results. Third, the social desir-
ability criticism was answered, in part, by a study by
Dutton and Hemphill, which correlated scores on two
measures of social desirability (the tendency to pre-
sent a “perfect image” on self-report tests) and scores
on the CTS. Social desirability is measured by a
test called the Marlowe-Crowne test (MC), which
assesses the tendency to present the self in a socially
acceptable manner. MC scores did correlate signifi-
cantly; the higher their social desirability score, the
lower their reported rates of verbal abuse. However, it
did not correlate with their reports of physical abuse,
nor with any reports of abuse (verbal or physical)
made against them by their wives. Hence, it seems
that reports of physical abuse are largely uncontami-
nated by socially desirable responding. This means
that the incidence survey rates are probably fairly
accurate as far as image management is concerned.
Finally, the vast majority of violent acts are perceived
as emanating from conflict. While the CTS may
miss an out-of-the-blue attack, it more than makes
up for this with its increased sensitivity over crime
victim surveys.Donald G. Dutton, Jessica Broderick,
and Makenzie ChiltonSee also Domestic Violence Screening Instrument (DVSI);
Intimate Partner Violence; Spousal Assault Risk
Assessment (SARA)Further Readings
Browning, J., & Dutton, D. G. (1986). Assessment of wife
assault with the Conflict Tactics Scale: Using couple data
to quantify the differential reporting effect. Journal of
Marriage and the Family, 48,375–379.146 ———Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS)C-Cutler (Encyc)-45463.qxd 11/18/2007 12:41 PM Page 146