Title: Investigating Non-invariance of Psychological Intimate Partner Violence Measures in the
Demographic and Health Surveys: Roles of Survey Design and National Context in 19 Countries
Version: 1 Date: 31 Mar 2025
Reviewer:  Meltem Ozcan
Reviewer's report:
Thank you for the opportunity to review the manuscript titled "Are “Global Measures” of
Psychological Intimate Partner Violence Against Women Really Comparable? A Measurement
Invariance Analysis of Controlling Behaviors in 19 Low- and Middle-Income Countries", which
addresses the important issue of measurement (non)invariance of controlling behavior measures
in IPV research.
This manuscript investigates the measurement invariance (MI) of five DHS items measuring
controlling behaviors, a critical dimension of psychological intimate partner violence (IPV)
against women. The authors constructed nine survey design groups using tertiles of two
variables: 1) the number of weeks of interviewer training (proxy for interviewer skill), and 2)
the number of preceding modules in the survey (proxy for respondent burden), and tested for
exact, partial, and approximate MI using MGCFA and AO across these groups. Subsequently,
they incorporated individual and nation-level covariates, such as attitudes towards IPV and years
of schooling, to explore factors that might explain observed noninvariance across the design
groups. This manuscript offers a valuable contribution to the field, and the following suggestions
aim to further refine and enhance its clarity and impact.
The AO approach has several strengths that make it appropriate for the current research, such
as its superior performance in many-group settings and effectiveness in cases with substantial
noninvariance (up to 50%, as demonstrated in Asparouhov & Muthén, 2023). Highlighting
such advantages and providing a brief conceptual discussion of AO and the properties of the
approximate MI model would strengthen the manuscript.
A more detailed rationale for selecting respondent burden and interviewer skill as key design
variables, as well as for using tertiles to form survey design groups, would be beneficial.
Exploring the reasons behind this choice, as opposed to alternatives like binary grouping or
maintaining continuous variables, as well as any limitations of this approach, would strengthen
the methodological justification. Additionally, the attitudinal variable 'the extent of justifying
wife beating,' computed as an average across five binary items, was employed as a covariate.
Further elaboration on this approach would be valuable. Specifically, clarifying whether creating
a composite mean measure from these five items is standard practice, and providing further
context for why 'the extent of justifying wife beating' was chosen as a covariate of interest, with
reference to existing research, would be helpful. Furthermore, a broader discussion of covariate
selections, and a consideration of potentially influential but omitted variables such as cultural
context and language, would contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the findings,
especially since questionnaire language data were available in the dataset.
The authors' current use of AO and MGCFA is well-executed and provides a solid foundation
for their findings. For future investigations that seek to explore the nuances of covariate
effects, moderated nonlinear factor analysis (MNLFA; Curran et al., 2015) presents a flexible
alternative that allows direct testing of covariates without discretization, among other potential
methodological advantages.
It might be worthwhile for the authors to explore WLS mean and variance adjusted (WLSMV)
or diagonally weighted least squares (DWLS) instead of WLS for their MGCFA with binary
data, as these estimators are often considered more robust for this type of data.
The authors state that they included data from participants who responded to at least one
item (line 275). To further clarify the data context, the authors may consider providing more
information on the distribution of missingness across items, both overall and within each
LMIC. Additionally, it would be helpful to know how many different languages the items
were administered in, and if there were any differences in item wording across the 42 DHS.
Furthermore, the Descriptive Characteristics section should include the age distribution of
participants within each group. While substantial differences were noted across groups for
variables like the Women's Business and Law Index, only means and standard deviations were
reported. Statistical testing of these differences across groups is recommended.
For greater transparency, the MPLUS code used for the various measurement invariance testing
procedures may be made available online.
Minor comments:
Line 22-23: It should be clarified that this statement pertains to a particular instrument or specific
set of items measuring controlling behavior (i.e., DHS items).
Please note that the data are not currently available for download from the DHS Program website.
In conclusion, this manuscript presents a valuable contribution to the field of IPV research,
addressing a critical methodological issue with a rigorous analytical approach. The suggestions
provided aim to further enhance the clarity, robustness, and transparency of the findings. I look
forward to seeing the authors' revisions.