Student Research Report: Gender Differences and Intimate Partner Violence

In Spring 2022, students in Dr. Emily Stark’s Research Methods and Design course completed multiple hands-on data collection projects. They were also assigned a blog paper where they discussed one of the topics they chose to research and explained their findings to a general audience. The goal of this assignment was to give students an opportunity to explore a different form of writing from APA-style research papers. Some of these blog papers will be featured here to showcase the students’ findings. Please feel free to contact Dr. Stark through the contact form on this site for additional information about this course or the assignments used.

By Jersie Schreder

Relationships are a natural part of our life, especially as college students. However, why is it that intimate partner violence (IPV) is most common among college students? This type of violence is damaging to mental health and may have hidden consequences later in life. This topic interested me for a research project because, especially in today’s world, the climate around dating, relationships, feminism, and gender roles is ever-changing.

The research I was interested in for this project related to anything having to do with gender and IPV. The first study done by Gromley and Lopez looked specifically at college students and stress. The research found that men with higher stress levels and more self-perceived serious problems perpetuated more relationship violence, and this relationship was not observed among women (2010). Another study looked at childhood and how exposure to parent-to-parent violence affects college students in their relationships now (Karakurt, 2013). This study, unlike the last, found that both men and women perpetuated more relationship violence when they were exposed to it in childhood. These two research studies aim to find out if outside factors affect relationships, but I wanted to find out how gender relates to how severe abuse is perceived.

For my Research Methods and Design course, I created a survey that I distributed to groups I had access to. This survey contained two scenarios that were exactly the same, however, in one a woman was the abuser and in the other a man was the abuser. The scenario depicted an emotionally abusive argument between a couple. I choose emotional abuse because I think it is a more prevalent form of intimate partner violence in today’s society and I feel it is not as obvious as physical abuse. After participants read through one of the scenarios that the computer program randomly assigned to them, I asked them to rank three questions relating to the severity of the abuse, how much psychological help the abuser needs, and how worried they would be if they saw this encounter in public. Participants were given a 1 to 5 scale, with 1 being low/not severe and 5 being high/severe.

I hypothesized that men would have overall higher ratings, meaning they would think the abuse was more severe, the abuser would need more psychological help, and they would be more worried if they saw the interaction in public if a woman was the abuser, and women would say the same things when a man was the abuser. The hypothesis ended up being supported by the analysis of an interaction between the gender of participants and the gender of the abuser on all three questions. Overall, men ranked the three questions significantly higher when a woman was the abuser and women ranked the three questions significantly higher when a man was the abuser.

A significant result for this experiment was exciting, but it doesn’t mean that this project is getting published in a big research journal or anything. The studies I was reading and taking background information from had hundreds of participants and mine only had forty participants. This was because the survey could only be out for a couple of weeks and the project has a due date. I would love to run this study again with a few modifications to see what new results would emerge.

Overall, I want to bring awareness to the problem of intimate partner violence with this post because it does affect college students everywhere. I wanted to share some information about what an emotionally abusive relationship looks like and the steps someone can take to get out of it. Emotional abuse comes in many forms, but some characteristics include repeated insults or name-calling, threats of violence, gaslighting, manipulation, and judgment. This type of violence can be hard to detect for some because emotional abusers are very good at putting the blame on the victim. If talking to family and friends is uncomfortable or upsetting, the National Domestic Violence Helpline is a 24/7 confidential resource to help people experiencing abuse. They may be able to connect victims with shelters and other resources.

Locally, CADA has resources for victims as well as on campus, VARP, the Women’s Center, and Counseling Center are accessible for students dealing with relationship abuse.

To conclude this post, I have attached a couple of websites that advocate for and model what healthy relationships look like and the resources I talked about in the previous paragraph.

References

Gormley, B., & Lopez, F. G. (2010). Psychological abuse perpetration in college dating relationships: Contributions of gender, stress, and adult attachment orientations. Journal of interpersonal Violence, 25(2), 204-218.


Karakurt, G., & Silver, K. E. (2013). Emotional abuse in intimate relationships: the role of gender and age. Violence and victims, 28(5), 804–821. https://doi.org/10.1891/0886-6708.vv-d-12-00041

Relationships, PedagogyKarla Lassonde