Physical violence in young Chilean couples: Association with the relationship quality

Carmen Viejo, Paulina Rincón and Rosario Ortega-Ruiz

Children and Youth Services Review, 2018, vol. 93, issue C, 217-225

Abstract: Objective: In Chile, between 7 and 24% of young people claim to be victims of physical violence in their romantic relationships, but there is a lack of validated questionnaires to measure these behaviors and research in this area is still limited. Due to this fact, adapting and validating the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS; Straus, 1979; Straus et al., 1996) with multi-group confirmatory factor analysis was conducted in this paper; afterword, it aims to analyze the violence involvement within the young couples (dating violence) in Chile, and its association with the perceived quality of the relationship. Method: 1283 university students participated (69.1% women; 30.9% men; mean age = 21.94; s.d. = 1.871). Results: A bi-factorial model of the CTS (moderate vs severe behaviors) with sex invariance among the youth population in Chile was confirmed. Between 15 and 25% of involvement in moderate violence was pointed out; these behaviors have high percentages of reciprocity and are occasional. The negative quality variables such as imbalance of power or conflicts are related to higher rates of involvement in violence, but not the positive quality variables such as communication. Conclusions: this paper represents a novel contribution for Dating Violence analysis in the Latin American context; it establishes a validated and invariance measure for analyzing Dating Violence with Chilean youth population, and pointed out high rates of involvement on this violent behaviors. Its value for the development of precautionary policies and suitable intervention has to be considered.

Keywords: Dating violence; Young romantic relationships; Social relationships quality; Multi-group model; Conflict Tactics Scale (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0190740918304298
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:cysrev:v:93:y:2018:i:c:p:217-225

DOI: 10.1016/j.childyouth.2018.07.021

Access Statistics for this article

Children and Youth Services Review is currently edited by Duncan Lindsey

More articles in Children and Youth Services Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().