Community influences on intimate partner violence in India: Women's education, attitudes towards mistreatment and standards of living☆
Section snippets
Women's education in India and risk for IPV
The second National Family Health Survey (NFHS-2) conducted throughout India in 1998–1999 (International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS) and ORC Macro, 2000) reported a strong negative gradient between educational attainment for married women and their reports of being beaten or physically mistreated in the past 12 months (recent IPV): illiterate, 14.1%; <middle school, 8.8%; middle school complete, 7.0%; and high school complete and above 3.6%. In a recent study of the same data set,
Methods
In the NFHS-2, female interviewers used standard survey questionnaires administered face-to-face to collect health-related information from a nationally representative probability sample of women aged 15–49 years living in household dwellings. The survey used a stratified, multi-stage, cluster design based on the 1991 Census. Each state was divided into urban and rural areas. In urban areas, wards listed in the 1991 Census were stratified by district and female literacy, and a sample of wards
Intimate Partner Violence (IPV)
Three questions taken from the Status of Women module were used to classify IPV in the last 12 months. The stem question read, ‘Since you completed 15 years of age, have you been beaten or mistreated physically by any person?’ Women responding yes were asked to identify their relationship to all persons responsible for such acts and then to report the aggregate frequency of occurrence in the last 12 months in three categories: once, a few times and many times. Women answering yes to the stem
Results
Table 1 presents summary information on the total sample. There are 26 states, 3118 areas (clusters) and 68,466 women. There is substantial variation in the prevalence of IPV between states (1.5 to 19.0%) and between clusters (0.0 to 61.5%). About 31.3% of women live in urban areas and 51.4% live in nuclear families. On average, women have 3.90 years of education and 9.7% of the sample reported exposure to IPV in the last 12 months.
Correlations among the study variables are shown in Table 2. At
Discussion
In this study, clustering of IPV was extensive, accounting for about 21.5% of its variability and evenly divided between large states and communities. This contrasts with other studies in which the clustering of health-related phenomena is much less evident in larger administrative areas than smaller communities in the same country (Boyle & Willms, 1999). States in India are relatively autonomous and quite diverse in language, culture and economic standing. Across states and communities in
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Michael Boyle is supported by a Canada Research Chair in the Social Determinants of Child Health. Katholiki Georgiades is supported by an Ontario Mental Health Foundation New Investigator Fellowship. The authors thank Jon Rasbash for his helpful comments on the manuscript.