An estimated two to four million women are physically abused each year and between 21 and 60 percent of all women have been beaten at least once by their male partner. Battering is thought to be responsible for more injuries to women than motor vehicle crashes, rape and mugging combined. While abuse is often equated with acute injuries, research is also finding that abused women are at greater risk for other health problems such as non-injury related chronic pain, miscarriage, and depression, and are thought to overutilize health services. Despite the high prevalence of abuse, our ability to identify abused women continues to pose significant challenges. Most measurement instruments date are of uncertain validity, focus exclusively on the physical assault dimension of abuse, to the exclusion of psychological and/or sexual abuse, and promote a social construction of abuse as an acute problem rather than as a chronic one. This study proposes to develop and validate an Intimate Relationship Abuse Perception (IRAP) Scale for measuring the degree to which women perceive themselves to experience intimate relationship abuse, defined here as the physical, sexual and/or psychological abuse of a woman by her intimate partner. The scale is intended to measure women's perceptions of their experience of abuse not the actual occurrence of specific violent acts. The IRAP Scale is being designed to measure not only the physical assault dimension of abuse but its sexual and psychological dimensions as well. Among other things, such as scale will more accurately portray abuse as a chronic, rather than as an acute, problem. The methods proposed for the development of the IRAP Scale are designed to improve on the content validity of other measurement instruments by taking the initial list of items for the scale directly from abused women using focus group methodology. The reliability and discriminant validity of the scale will be assessed through established known-group and factor analytic methodologies. The known-group method consists of administering a Women's Health and Health Behavior Survey to equal numbers of known-abused and known-nonabused women (150 each). Included in the survey will be the IRAP Scale items plus other measures of health risk factors, and health status, behavior and utilization outcomes. Relationships among abuse, and health outcomes of interest will be assessed through analysis of the known-groups survey data. The availability of a standardized research scale for identifying and measuring intimate relationship will allow researches, through its application, to better determine the effect of abuse, relative to other psychosocial and behavioral variables, on health status and health utilization outcomes.
