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UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Gendering Intimate Partner Violence: an Analysis of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/75s38638 Author Messinger, Adam Publication Date 2010 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Gendering Intimate Partner Violence: an Analysis of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology by Adam Messinger June 2010 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Kirk R. Williams, Chairperson Dr. Bob Hanneman Dr. Scott Coltrane Copyright by Adam Messinger 2010 Signature Approval Page The Dissertation of Adam Messinger is approved: ______________________________________________ ______________________________________________ ______________________________________________ Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside Acknowledgements Many thanks to Dr. Bob Hanneman, Dr. Kirk Williams, and Dr. Scott Coltrane for your countless hours of advice, guidance, and mentorship. iv Dedication For my wife, Marina, whose patience, humor, and love helped me through this difficult and rewarding project. v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Gendering Intimate Partner Violence: an Analysis of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health by Adam Messinger Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in Sociology University of California, Riverside, June 2010 Dr. Kirk R. Williams, Chairperson Scholars have long posited that intimate partner violence (IPV) – physical violence, sexual violence, verbal abuse, and controlling behaviors between intimate partners – is impacted by masculinity norms of aggression and dominance (for example, see Haraway and O’Neil 1999; Moore and Stuart 2005). Despite this topic’s immense potential for prevention and treatment policies, quantitative IPV research tends to eschew empirically informed measures of masculinities and femininities in favor of a simplistically binary male-female variable, likely in part because of methodological concerns over how to adequately measure the complexities of gender. This is unfortunate given that the representative nature of large-scale, quantitatively-analyzed research is of great value to policymakers. The present dissertation provides a thorough background on the gender vi and IPV literatures with a particular focus on the history and benefits of quantifying gender. Additionally, the Bem Sex-Role Inventory, the most widely used measure of gendered psychological traits in the literature, is used to predict IPV in an analysis of 4,027 nationally-representative adolescents in a relationship, data drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. This represents the first study using a gender trait measure to predict IPV utilizing a nationally-representative sample. Findings from negative binomial regression and multinomial logistic regression analyses reveal that a lack of femininity – rather than simply the presence of masculinity – predicts an increased risk of IPV perpetration and victimization for both men and women. Methodological and policy implications as well as future directions are discussed. vii Table of Contents Introduction ….. p. 1 Chapter 1: The Nature of IPV .…. p. 8 Chapter 2: IPV Prevalence by Binary Gender ….. p. 24 Chapter 3: Finding Gender ….. p. 49 Chapter 4: The Bem Sex-Role Inventory ….. p. 76 Chapter 5: Gendered IPV Theories ….. p. 106 Chapter 6: Qualitative & Quantitative Insights ….. p. 127 Chapter 7: Gendered IPV in AddHealth ….. p. 159 Chapter 8: Gendered Underreporting in AddHealth ….. p. 198 Chapter 9: Conclusions ….. p. 217 Bibliography ….. p. 233 viii List of Figures Figure 1: Original BSRI Items ….. p. 85 Figure 2: BSRI-S Items ….. p. 88 ix List of Tables Table 1.1 Descriptive Statistics ….. p. 176 Table 1.2 Percentage of Men and Women Endorsing Each BSRI Category ….. p. 178 Table 1.3 Percentage of Respondents Experiencing Exclusively Male-to-Female, Exclusively Female-to-Male, Bidirectional, and No Physical and Sexual IPV ….. p. 178 Table 1.4 Frequency of IPV within Exclusively Male-to-Female, Exclusively Female-to-Male, and Bidirectional Physical and Sexual IPV ….. p. 179 Table 1.5 Percentage of Male and Female Respondents Within BSRI Categories Currently Experiencing Use and Receipt of Physical and Sexual IPV ….. p. 180 Table 1.6 Means of IPV Measures by Binary Gender and BSRI Categories Among Respondents in an IPV Relationship ….. p. 182 Table 1.7 Correlation Matrix for Primary Study Variables (N = 4,027) ….. p. 183 Table 2.1 Summary of Multinomial Logistic Regressions with BSRI Predicting Direction of Physical IPV ….. p. 187 Table 2.2 Summary of Multinomial Logistic Regressions with x BSRI Predicting Direction of Sexual IPV ….. p. 189 Table 3.1 Summary of Negative Binomial Regressions with BSRI Predicting IPV Among Male Respondents ….. p. 192 Table 3.2 Summary of Negative Binomial Regressions with BSRI Predicting IPV Among Female Respondents ….. p. 194 Table 4.1 IPV Prevalence Agreement Based on Average Male and Female Responses ….. p. 211 Table 4.2 IPV Occurrence Agreement Based on Average Male and Female Responses ….. p. 212 Table 4.3 IPV Prevalence Agreement Based on Average Male and Female Responses by BSRI Categorization ….. p. 214 xi Introduction What is missing, oddly, from these claims of gender symmetry is an analysis of gender. By this, I mean more than simply a tallying up of which biological sex is more likely to be perpetrator or victim. I mean an analysis that explicitly underscores the ways in which gender identities and gender ideologies are embodied and enacted by women and men. Examining domestic violence through a gender lens helps clarify several issues (Kimmel 2002, 1344). The modern gender literature suggests gender norms for a given culture intersect with other sets of norms on race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, and age to form multiple versions of masculinities and femininities (King 1988; West and Fenstermaker 1995). What is more, although cultural expectations often encourage biologically male individuals to abide by norms of masculinities and biologically female individuals to follow norms of femininities, in this literature gender is perceived to be a performance in which people do not always rigidly follow the norms they have been taught, even to the extent that some men may perform aspects of femininities while some women can perform aspects of masculinities (Butler 1990, 1997; Halberstam 1998; West and Zimmerman 1987). Gender norms govern every imaginable type of behavior, including intimate partner violence, or IPV (Anderson 2005; White 2009), a crime of sexual violence, physical violence, verbal abuse, or controlling behaviors perpetrated between two partners currently or formerly in a romantic or sexual relationship. The question, of course, is how exactly does gender impact IPV? The purpose of this dissertation is to begin to find an answer. 1 IPV scholars have long contended that the key may lie with culturally mainstream “hegemonic” masculinity (Connell 1987), which encourages men to be emotionally distant as well as aggressive in the quest for dominance (Crowell and Burgess 1996; Haraway and O’Neil 1999; Moore and Stuart 2005; Thorne-Finch 1992). Unfortunately, as many IPV researchers are not familiar with today’s gender literature, often it is assumed there is only one type of masculinity – hegemonic – and that only men can embody it. Thus, the binary gender variable – are you male or are you female, check the box that applies – has become a way for IPV researchers to test if gender, specifically hegemonic masculinity, predicts IPV perpetration. According to this logic, if more males perpetrate IPV, then this must be because they perform hegemonic masculinity while women do not. Conversely, if men and women are equally likely to perpetrate IPV, then some researchers have argued that hegemonic masculinity and, indeed, gender in general are entirely unrelated to IPV. Upon discovering in recent nationally representative studies that physical IPV is equally likely to be perpetrated by men and women, many researchers termed this phenomenon “gender symmetry” or “sex symmetry” and claimed it as proof that gender is unrelated to IPV (Dutton 1994; Dutton and Nicholls 2005; Felson 2002; Hamel 2007; McNeely, Cook, and Torres 2001; Straus 1979, 1993, 2006). A debate has ensued over the past two decades as to whether other aspects of IPV – such as initiation of violence, sexual violence, stalking, partner homicide, and physical and mental health outcomes – show that men and women are equally likely to be “abusers” or if, contrary to physical IPV perpetration data, men are more often the abusers (for 2 reviews of the debate, see Anderson 2005; DeKeseredy 2006; Dutton and Nicholls 2005; Kimmel 2002; Saunders 2002; Straus 1999, 2006, 2008). Certainly, if men are more often IPV abusers, this would lend credence to theories predicting that gender impacts IPV. However, even if men and women are equally likely to be abusers, the gender literature would suggest that gender may still play a role. Specifically, it is conceivable that one of the versions of gender, likely hegemonic masculinity, predicts IPV perpetration, and both men and women could potentially be performing aspects of hegemonic masculinity. How can this be tested? Many have offered that gender