Husband-to-wife violence has been the focus of much research and several theories have attempted to explain its occurrence. This study tested exchange theory and resource theory, examining the possibility that not only lower status husbands, but also husbands of higher status, may be influenced toward aggression by status discrepancies with their…

This study tested the learned helplessness theory, stress theory, and a modified stress theory to determine the best model for predicting the probability that a woman would seek help when she experienced severe violence from a male partner. The probability was hypothesized to increase as the stress of the violence experienced increased. Data were…

This study examined the relationships between alcohol abuse and spousal violence for 96 women in alcoholism treatment as compared to these comparison groups: 78 women receiving mental health treatment; 98 women receiving services for family violence; 91 women from a random sample of households; and 100 women in a driver education program following…

This study was conducted to examine the moderating effects of attributions on the relationship between marital satisfaction and marital violence. It was predicted that distressed spouses who made more maladaptive attributions for partner behavior would be more likely to engage in marital violence than would distressed spouses who offered fewer…

Alcohol consumption is often associated with aggressive behaviors. This study compared the contexts and reasons for drinking of maritally violent men (N=44) and three maritally nonviolent comparison groups: happily married men (N=54), unhappily married men (N=41), and men who had been convicted of a violent offense, but who did not beat their…

This paper describes a set of therapeutic tactics employed in the treatment of court-ordered spouse abusers at a community-based counseling center. The introduction states that the term therapeutic tactics was chosen to describe a class of interventions which are closer in nature to strategic ploys used in a contest rather than collaborative…

Recent qualitative investigations of abusive men have indicated that power and control of the wife are central themes in incidents of marital violence. Furthermore, anecdotal and empirical evidence suggest that abusive husbands hold more traditional sex-role stereotypes, are more possessive and jealous, and are more controlling than nonabusive…

Surveys of married and dating couples find that women assault their male partners at about the same rate as men assault female partners. When assaults serious enough to cause death were examined, it was found that in contrast to the extreme rarity of homicide by women outside the family, women kill their male partners at a rate that approaches the…

A number of factors came together in the 1970s to create a social problem called "battered wives". Then, beginning in 1977, there was an attempt to create a social problem called "battered husbands." So far, such attempts have been unsuccessful. This analysis compares the issue of battered husbands and battered wives to…

This study examined the hypothesis that the reason people believe the two sexes have different personality traits is because they enact roles that vary in power. Men usually enact a dominant role, expressing personality traits of self-assertion or agency, while women usually enact a subordinate role, expressing the personality traits of…

There are many studies of violence in marriage and in dating. Methodological differences between studies, however, make it difficult to determine differences in the nature and extent of physical assault between marital status groups. This study analyzed data from two surveys: a study of 526 dating couples at a large midwestern university, and a…

Several researchers have explored the role of alcohol in domestic violence and attributions of blame. To compare the amount of blame attributed to an incident of wife abuse, alcoholic (N=52) and nonalcoholic (N=159) subjects read an account of wife abuse and distributed a percentage of the blame to the man, the woman, and the situation.…

A fundamental issue in research on violence between couples who are dating or married is the question of when abuse begins in the relationship. A study was conducted to examine the relationship between gender, level of emotional commitment, and the use of conflict tactics in couples whose levels of emotional commitment ranged from "casual…

This report presents cross-sectional data on the relationships of alcohol difficulties, antisocial behavior, family conflict, family violence, and, particularly, spousal violence. The data were derived from a large-scale, longitudinal study of causes of alcohol abuse and the development of patterns of family violence. Subjects in the part of the…