The Development and Psychometric Evaluation of the Reasons for Disclosing Sexual and Intimate Partner Violence Scale

Abstract

A wide body of research has studied what happens when survivors disclose interpersonal violence (Ullman, 2010; Ullman & Filipas, 2001). Less studied is why survivors disclose their experiences. Although research in other disciplines has created measures to assess the reasons for disclosing other concealable identities (Derlega, Winstead, Folk-Barron, & Petronio, 2000), the present study aimed to fill a gap in the existing literature by creating a measure to assess the reasons for disclosing sexual and intimate partner violence. The Reasons for Disclosing Sexual and Intimate Partner Violence Scale was created after interviewing survivors and receiving feedback on the measure from crisis center advocates and experts in the field (i.e., content validity). The psychometric properties (i.e., dimensionality and reliability) of the measure were tested with a sample of 274 adult female survivors of sexual and intimate partner violence. The results suggested that reasons for disclosing sexual and intimate partner violence can be broken down into seven factors (e.g., safety and justice, image validation), and that these reasons vary from other concealable identities.