Courtship Violence and Sex-Typing

Abstract

The 1970's might reasonably be described as the decade in which social science discovered domestic (e.g., wife abuse). The magnitude of the problem was given sharp definition by Straus, Gelles and Steinmetz (1980) who reported that in a representative sample of 2,143 American households, one in six would be the setting for between husband and wife. Yet, the burgeoning literature in this area has consisted largely of anecdotal information about abused women, paralleled by a striking paucity of data about the men who abuse them (Bernard & Bernard, 1984; Ponzetti, Cate & Koval, 1982; Walker, 1979). The 1980's saw a shift in emphasis which, incidentally, shows promise of helping to overcome what has been a chronic problem with data collection in this area. Makepeace (1981) reported on what has come to be known as courtship violence using 202 college students as his subject pool. He found an incidence of in this population that is comparable to that reported for married couples by Straus et al. (1980). While his results were of interest in their own right, his study also indicated that college students, traditional subjects for social science research, could reasonably be utilized for research on