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Profiles of Attitudes Toward Dating Abuse and Association with Subsequent Adolescent Relationship Abuse

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Abstract

This study investigates variation in adolescent attitudes regarding dating violence under different conditions, the association of these conditional attitudes with subsequent adolescent relationship abuse (ARA), and youth and parent-reported characteristics associated with youth attitudes. The sample consists of 607 youth, as a subset from those who responded to a nationally representative longitudinal survey of dating violence. A latent class analysis identified three profiles of attitudinal patterns: No Tolerance for Hitting Partners (NT), Some Tolerance for Hitting Partners (ST), and High Tolerance for Hitting Partners (HT). The HT profile predicted subsequent physical (compared to the NT profile), sexual ARA perpetration (compared to both the NT and the ST profiles), and physical ARA victimization (compared to the NT profile). The ST profile predicted subsequent psychological ARA perpetration and victimization (compare to the NT profile). Results inform youth dating violence prevention programs to reduce ARA and intimate partner violence by changing youth attitudes toward dating violence.

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Notes

  1. We compared the excluded sample with the selected sample using the dating during wave 3 and wave 4 criterion, and found that although other characteristics were similar, those who were excluded due to this criterion (N = 778; average age 12.9) were significantly younger than those included in the sample (N = 693; average age 14.5).

  2. We conducted a sensitivity analysis using a dichotomous income variable (reflecting household income below and above the median of the sampled households), and results did not change.

  3. We first ran the analysis separately for males and females. The differences are mostly in the class distribution. The two classes with highest prevalence (accounting for about 95% of the sample) are structurally very similar, with minor differences only observed in the smallest class (~ 5%). Given the observed similarities and for reasons of parsimony, we decided to combine males and females and use gender as a covariate. This decision is also driven by the fact that separating males and females will result in much smaller sample size and reduced power to detect the relationship between class membership and ARA outcomes as well as that between class membership and covariates. Future studies with a larger sample size may conduct separate analyses for males and females.

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Funding

This research was funded by the National Institute of Justice (2014-VA-CX-0065).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Public Health Research, NORC at the University of Chicago, 4350 E-West Hwy 8th Floor, Bethesda, MD, 20814, USA

    Weiwei Liu, Elizabeth A. Mumford & Bruce G. Taylor

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  1. Weiwei Liu
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  2. Elizabeth A. Mumford
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Correspondence to Weiwei Liu.

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Liu, W., Mumford, E.A. & Taylor, B.G. Profiles of Attitudes Toward Dating Abuse and Association with Subsequent Adolescent Relationship Abuse. Prev Sci 24, 650–662 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11121-022-01452-7

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