Reviewer's report
Title:An Examination of Domestic Partner Violence and its Justification in the
Republic of Georgia
Version: 2Date:7 May 2013
Reviewer: Stephen Lawoko
Reviewer's report:
This paper is of importance to the field of IPV particularly as there is a shortage
of such data from Eastern Europe, and the authors recognize this in their
background. The paper is well written and organized, but will benefit from the
revisions suggested below
- Major Compulsory Revisions
1) A number of crucial statistical concerns need to be addressed either through
more elaborate discussion or re-analysis. First, it is not clear how/why poisson
regression was used. In my view, this type of regression is used for counts (e.g. it
would be understandable if the authors were modeling number of scenarios a
participant justifies). If I am not mistaken, the outcome being modeled here is
dichotomous, i.e. each scenario studied is being modeled separately, and the
options are either justifiable or not! Why not use the logistic regression option
both for crude and adjusted odds-ratios? Moreover, it is not stated what exactly
the authors are adjusting for in the models. Is it for all variables in table 1? If so,
have they considered potential multi-collinearity between the IPV indicators (e.g.
lifetime IPV and past year IPV; abused as a child and Parental IPV etc etc).
Statistical consultation is warranted, unless any of the authors is a Statistician.
Otherwise, the authors need to motivate more elaborately the choice of analytical
methods.
2) It is not clear how the scenarios studied were arrived at. I understand that this
is secondary data and the authors have not themselves chosen which scenario
to study, but some information from the original researchers as to how they
choose to study these specific scenarios is warranted. Could another set of
scenarios have given a different result? I will here contrast scenarios from
different societies to make my point. Studies from England and Scotland for
example find that up to one in three women/men justify sexual abuse of a woman
if she is drunk, 27% if she flirts, 15% if she has had many partners before etc etc
(see for e.g. TNS System survey of 986 Scots for the Scottish government, 2008;
Sexual assault research, ICM/Amnesty international UK, 2005).
In the demographic and Health Surveys, DHS, which are nationally
representative surveys in many African and Asian countries and are similar to the
RHS in many ways, similar scenarios for the justification of IPV as in the current
study are used. However, it appears the scenarios were a result of qualitative
studies in the studied contexts (mainly sub-saharan African countries), which
scenarios were later adapted to the survey. The results showed up to between
30-70% justification of abuse for a given scenario in most Sub-saharan African
countries (see for example Uthman et al., in your references). Could this be
because the scenarios were contextually valid? Are another set of scenarios (e.g.
as in England/Scotland) more contextually valid for Georgia? The Authors thus
need to add further information on the source of these scenarios, and provide a
discussion of contextual validity of the outcome measures used in this study.
3) The authors appear to under-tone some of their interesting findings,
particularly with regards to social/demographic predictors of justification of IPV.
They neither mention these in the abstract, nor discuss them at all in the
discussion. Yet, the implication of such predictors (e.g. education, poverty,
unemployment etc.) for prevention is currently a topic of controversy in the
research, as in some context, the likelihood of justification of abuse increases
with education, while in others the opposite is observed (see for example Lawoko
S. Predictors of Attitudes towards Intimate Partner Violence: a comparative study
of men in Zambia and Kenya. J Inter Viol 2008;23:1056-1074. ). The findings
from Georgia could provide important data in favor of the former, and on overall,
providing support for the need to study each specific context before the
adaptation of universal interventions.
- Minor Essential Revisions
4) At the beginning of the background, the authors provide interesting historical
data, but need to reference this information. Though not very clearly indicated,
there is also some implication by the authors in the introduction that longstanding
societal violence/conflict may increase conflicts/violence even in the domestic
arena. Yes, this is true and important in this context, but the authors may need to
state this more explicitly and provide references accordingly (e.g. WHO world
report on violence and injury, 2008).
Level of interest: An article of importance in its field
Quality of written English: Acceptable
Statistical review: Yes, and I have assessed the statistics in my report.
Declaration of competing interests:
I declare that I have no competing interests