Development and validation of the Domestic Violence Questionnaire in married women aged 18-55 years

Abstract

Background: Intimate partner violence against women is seen in all cultures. It has wide-ranging effects on the physical and psychological health of women. In the local language, available questionnaires are either too exhaustive or inadequate to assess domestic violence comprehensively.

Objective: To develop a Domestic Violence Questionnaire in Malayalam and validate it for married women aged 18-55 years in the local population.

Study design: Descriptive study - Validation of questionnaire.

Materials and methods: A 29-item questionnaire, to identify domestic violence over the past 1 year, was developed in the local language, by selecting items from two other questionnaires and based on expert opinion. Item reduction was done after pilot testing. Then, this 25-item questionnaire was administered to 276 married women aged 18-55 years. Reliability and validity were estimated. Factor analysis was done for item reduction. Poor-loading, wrong-loading and cross-loading items were removed from the questionnaire. Taking the subjective perception of the participants regarding themselves experiencing domestic violence as the gold standard, a Receiver Operator Characteristic curve was drawn to decide the cut-off score with optimum sensitivity and specificity.

Results: The final questionnaire had 20 items - 13 items for psychological and 7 items for physical violence. Internal consistency reliability was 0.92. At a cut-off score of 5, sensitivity was 89.5% and specificity 87.2%.

Conclusions: The Domestic Violence Questionnaire in Malayalam has adequate psychometric properties to identify intimate partner violence against women in the local population.

Keywords: Domestic violence; intimate partner violence; questionnaire; women.

Figure 1

Scree plot showing factors with Eigen value more than one

Figure 2

Receiver Operator Characteristic curve with subjective perception as gold-standard