Justification of intimate partner violence in rural Bangladesh: what survey questions fail to capture.

Intimate partner violence (IPV) refers to physical, sexual, psychological, and economic violence and controlling behavior that men perpetrate against their wives or sex partners. Surveys such as the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) increasingly include questions intended to capture individuals’ attitudes about IPV and its prevalence and forms in poor settings. Questions about attitudes regarding wife beating were added to the DHS core module in the late 1990s as part of three modules designed to capture evidence of women’s empowerment over time. (The other two modules were women’s participation in household decisionmaking and refusing to have sex.) The assumption behind the questions is that truly empowered women would not agree with any justification for wife beating (Kishor and Subaiya 2008). The questions were intended to be implementable in all DHS countries with little or no change. To date, DHSs have collected data concerning IPV in more than 25 countries and on attitudes about IPV against women in more than 50 countries. The questions concerning attitudes about IPV ask women and men of reproductive age (15–49 years) to report whether they agree or disagree that wife abuse is justified in any of a prespecified list of scenarios. An analysis of surveys conducted in 23 poor countries reveals high, albeit variable, proportions of women who believe that such violence is justifiable. Seventeen percent of currently married women aged 15–49 in Nicaragua and 90 percent in Mali report that they agree with at least one of five reasons used to justify wife beating (Kishor and Subaiya 2008). In the 2007 Bangladesh DHS (NIPORT et al. 2009), 36 percent of married women of reproductive age said that a man would be justified in beating his wife for at least one of the five reasons listed (Kishor and Subaiya 2008). A study conducted in Bangladesh using DHS data from urban men found a correlation between men’s holding attitudes supportive of wife beating and the likelihood of their perpetrating IPV (Sambisa et al. 2010). A multicountry study using DHS data found that women’s justification of wife beating is associated with an increased risk of their experiencing IPV (Kishor and Johnson 2004); the causal direction is not clear, however (Koenig et al. 2003b). Although individual and community perceptions of IPV are potentially important correlates for changing this practice, our cross-cultural understanding of these attitudes and norms may be limited by weaknesses in the commonly used attitudinal survey questions about IPV. Such questions may, for example, conflate women’s own attitudes about IPV with their perceptions of norms about IPV in their communities (Schuler and Islam 2008). In light of the high prevalence of IPV perpetrated against women, the high reported levels of agreement with IPV, and the potential significance of anti-IPV attitudes for reducing women’s risk of experiencing this sort of violence, understanding the meanings and interpretations that respondents attach to attitudinal questions on gender-based violence is important. This study presents qualitative findings from a project designed to generate a more subtle understanding of what survey respondents mean when they say that men’s violence against their wives is justified, and to develop improved methodological tools to understand women’s and men’s attitudes about IPV from surveys. Two research questions are addressed here: (1) What sociocultural frames of reference influence the ways in which common survey questions regarding individual attitudes about IPV are understood and answered? and (2) How consistent are responses to these questions when study participants are given the opportunity to discuss their answers and when additional details are added to the questions?