This study proposes a national survey designed to advance our understanding of the association between alcohol and spousal violence among African-Americans, Hispanics, and Whites. The proposed investigation can be economically conducted together with an already funded national study of drinking among Whites (N=2,000), African- Americans (N=1,500) and Hispanics (N=1,500), thus achieving savings of approximately 1.2 million dollars in fieldwork costs alone. The proposed contributions of this study are descriptive, theoretical, and methodological. They are designed to: Descriptive: 1. Estimate annual rates of spousal violence for African-Americans, Hispanics, and Whites. 2. Estimate the association between spousal violence and a wide variety of alcohol measures for both the husband and the wife, several of which have not been previously employed in the literature (e.g., alcohol problems, alcohol dependence). Theoretical. 1. Congruent with social-structural theory (e.g., Gelles, 1985), test the hypothesis that poverty moderates the relationship between spousal violence and the alcohol use patterns of the husband and wife. 2. Assess a proposed model that attempts to explain the association between acculturation and spousal violence among Hispanics. 3. Test a structural model relating spousal violence to individual-level variables for each spouse, including: learning history, attitudes toward spousal violence, personality dispositions, alcohol cognitions, alcohol consumption, and the reported joint frequency of alcohol and violence with violence in the dyad. Methodological. 1. Expand research methodology in this area by investigating for the first time the degree to which a national sample of spouses concur in: 1) their perceptions of dyadic violence, and 2) the association between violent events and alcohol use. 2. Test whether the alcohol use patterns of the husband and wife explain differences in violence concordance after controlling for the effects of socioeconomic and demographic variables on violence. 3. Assess potential differences in interpretation of the data as a function of collecting data from one respondent versus couples. Specific predictions are hypothesized for each aim.
