Towards the construction and initial validation of the Asian Intimate Partner Abuse Scale

Intimate partner violence is a prevalent social and familial problem cross-culturally, with few means of prevention or treatment. Part of the challenge stems from the difficulty to assess abusers' potentiality to commit such violence and for the abused to recognize or acknowledge their risks of victimization. Relevant research conducted in Asian societies have mostly involved translating existing Western instruments that have a Eurocentric cultural bias and suffer from language translation barriers.;This study presents the construction and initial validation of a new culture-specific measure of Chinese attitudes toward intimate partner abuse, the Asian Intimate Partner Abuse Scale (AIPAS), using a known-groups method as the primary validation approach. Using a sample of Taiwanese adults, the results support the AIPAS as a valid measure that discriminates among the four sample "known groups" in the predicted directions. Specifically, mental health services professionals hold the strongest attitudes against intimate partner abuse, general public next, victims third, and abusers the weakest. Convergent and discriminant validations and factor analysis were also applied to assess instrument validity. The AIPAS showed a strong positive correlation with the Attitudes toward Women scale, indicating that individuals with high AIPAS scores hold more modern and profeminist attitudes toward women's roles and rights. The AIPAS was also negatively correlated with the Asian Values Scale on a moderate level, suggesting that individuals with high AIPAS scores also adhere less to traditional Asian beliefs. In addition, the AIPAS was only slightly correlated with the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale, suggesting that participants' concerns for social desirability had little influence on the results of the AIPAS. All of these results provide solid evidence for the AIPAS' convergent and discriminant validity. Furthermore, factor analysis indicated that the AIPAS consists of five subscales tapping differing factors influencing individuals' attitudes toward intimate partner violence. Overall scale reliability alpha = .84. In sum, the initial validation of the AIPAS attests to its capability as a valid and reliable instrument for assessing individuals' attitudes toward intimate partner abuse within Taiwanese society. The process of instrument construction, implications of the results, limitations of the study, and plans for future research are discussed.