Measuring Social Norms of Intimate Partner Violence to Exert Control over Wife Agency, Sexuality, and Reproductive Autonomy: An item Response Modelling of the IPV-ASRA Scale

"As social norms are understood to be a primary factor shaping patterns of IPV and RC behaviour within populations..., the IPV-ASRA Social Norms scale could be a critical tool for understanding contextual risk for IPV in a community and for evaluating the impact of programs intending to change IPV social norms."

Long-term prevention of gender-based violence (GBV), like intimate partner violence (IPV) and reproductive coercion (RC), requires efforts to change the social environment, including social norms that justify or uphold violent behaviour toward women. While some scales assess social norms broadly related to IPV and RC (e.g., traditional gender norms), very few scales measure the perceived social acceptability of these behaviours specifically or demonstrate correlation with violence perpetration. The present research assessed a social norms measure of the acceptability of exerting control over a wife's agency, sexuality, and reproductive autonomy (ASRA) using data from a cluster randomised controlled trial (RCT), called the Reaching Married Adolescents Study in Niger (RMA study), that took place in the Dosso region of Niger.

The Dosso region is made up of rural villages that identify as either culturally and linguistically Zarma or Hausa, each led by a male chief, where Islam and polygamy are widely practiced. Lifetime prevalence of physical IPV, sexual IPV, and RC are reported by 8.2%, 5.3%, and 10.2% of adolescent wives in the RMA study, respectively. These estimates of IPV are lower than national estimates of IPV among adult women in other similar contexts who have experienced child marriage, likely related to the young age (ages 13-18)  and short length of marriage at the time of surveying in this sample of adolescents and their husbands (n = 559 husband-wife dyads) in 2019. The present study primarily utilises data, collected in 2019 from husbands to understand their perceived social norms around IPV and how it relates to their behaviour.

The scale being tested in the study is as follows:

Preamble for all items: People in your community believe that…

1. ... a husband is justified in hitting or beating his wife if she uses a family planning method without informing him.
2. ... a husband is justified in hitting or beating his wife if she refuses to have sex with him.
3. ... if a woman refuses to have sex with her husband when he wants her to, he has the right to use force and have sex with her.
4. ... a husband is justified in hitting or beating his wife if she argues with him.
5. ... a husband is justified in hitting or beating his wife if she goes out without telling him.

In all models, the IPV-ASRA Social Norms scale demonstrated strong reliability, as well as internal structure and external validity. The items showed acceptable fit with the 2-dimensional Partial Credit Model (PCM), in which 2 subconstructs of IPV-ASRA social norms were represented: social acceptability of husband-perpetrated IPV if a wife is (i) not fulfilling her wifely sexual and reproductive duties, and (ii) challenging her husband's authority. Based on these findings, this brief 5-item IPV-ASRA Social Norms scale has strong potential for enhancing measurement of IPV social norms.

The finding that the fact that dimension (ii) (challenges husband authority) varied by IPV perpetration suggests that, in this cultural and social context, the norms that sanction wives for behaviours that challenge her husband's authority are more closely tied to the social norms that condone IPV. This finding that could be explored further as an opportunity for IPV prevention. It may be that wife behaviours that deviate from the norm of obedience to husbands are perceived as more threatening to the current gender norm structure and are therefore seen as more deserving of violent punishment from husbands to discipline this behaviour. In contrast, social expectations of wives to bear children, by being sexually available to their husbands and fertile, may be perceived as less threatening to current social power structures and less linked to the norms that condone IPV. Future qualitative work could help shed additional light on the types of gender norm transgressions that are perceived to merit IPV-related punishment and the mechanisms shaping these norms within villages.

This scale was not found to be associated with wife reports of husbands' RC behaviour. The researchers suspect that this (lack of) finding is likely due to the small number of husbands with wives reporting RC victimisation. It could be an indication that the scale would benefit from more than one item specifically related to the social acceptability of reproductive autonomy that could be included in future iterations of the scale. Future research to develop an additional RC item that would complement this scale and be most appropriate in this cultural context is needed.

In conclusion: "This brief scale is a short (5 questions), practical measure with strong reliability and validity evidence that can help identify populations with high-need for social norms-focused prevention and to help measure the impact of such efforts. This evidence strengthens the current set of measurement tools on social norms available to researchers and practitioners."