The Gender Violence - Implicit Association Test to measure attitudes toward intimate partner violence against women

Abstract

Attitudes play a central role in intimate partner violence against women and are related to its origin, to the responses of women who suffer violence, and to the settings where it occurs. In fact, these attitudes are recognized as one of the risk factors linked to violent perpetration and to public, professional, and victim responses to this type of violence. However, even though available research generally shows a broad rejection of this violence, it remains a serious social and health problem that has reached epidemic proportions. This suggests that the information available about these attitudes (obtained through explicit and direct measures, i.e., self-reports) may be distorted or influenced by factors such as social desirability. In this context, the overall objective of our research project is to provide multi-method measures (explicit and implicit) of attitudes toward intimate partner violence against women, and the main goal of this paper is to propose an instrument for the implicit measurement of these attitudes. In this regard, the Implicit Association Test (IAT) is the most common procedure used, providing a superior predictive validity compared to explicit measures for socially sensitive topics. We will present an exploratory study that describes its adaptation for our purposes, and the development of the Gender Violence - Implicit Association Test (GV-IAT) to use among Spanish-speaking populations, and discuss the strengths and limitations of this proposal.