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...that typically occurs in private and may often escape the detection of law enforcement authorities. Unfortunately, when formal intervention does not occur, the perceived costs of IPV may not outweigh the perceived benefits for the assailant, making it more likely that the abuse will continue (Gelles, 1983). The benefits of IPV may seem especially salient for perpetrators who gain power and control in the relationship, make negative attributions about their partner's behavior, justify their use of violence, and are generally unaware that their behavior is wrong (Brownlee & Chlebovec, 2004; Moore, Eisler, & Franchina, 2000). Moreover, the perceived costs of arrest are likely to be lowered when perceptions of privacy, relationship power, and approval of IPV are high for the assailant (Williams, 1992). Given the limitations of formal sanctions against IPV (e.g., Jackson et al., 2003; Maxwell, Garner, & Fagan, 2001), it is important to consider alternative prevention strategies.
To this end, informal social norms (i.e., collective social judgments about what is right, wrong, and expected behavior) regarding IPV should not be ignored. Informal norms operate through both the perceived and real judgments of fellow citizens, family, and friends, regarding how one ought to act (Deutsch & Gerard, 1955). According to Smithey and Straus (2004): "Research on deterrence theory suggests that primary prevention focused on informal sanctions, i.e., increasing the extent to which IPV is scorned and disapproved by peers, may be more effective than the current focus on increasing perception of criminal penalties for IPV" (p. 257). For example, the perceived social costs of arrest, such as the potential loss of one's partner and loss of respect from friends and loved ones, are a significant deterrent of IPV (Williams & Hawkins, 1992).
However, the real judgments of the assailant's social support networks can only influence the assailant if those persons are aware of the violence. Other analyses of data used in the present study indicate that nearly half of the general public in California personally knows a victim of IPV, more than one-third knew the victim while the abuse was occurring, and for about one in five persons, the victim was one of their three closest friends or relatives (Sorenson & Taylor, 2003). Similar results were found in other community-based studies including one in which, among the 53% who knew of or suspected IPV, nearly 75% spoke to the woman, more than 25% spoke to the man, and 60% consulted others about the problem (Nabi, Meehan-Starck, & Sunderland, 2000). This relatively high level of personal knowledge and engagement with the problem in the general community suggests that community judgments about fault and responsibility for IPV are likely to influence IPV outcomes and solutions.
Such judgments are likely to be contingent on characteristics of the persons involved, the incident itself, and the persons making the judgments. Past studies suggest that victim and assailant gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity may influence attributions of fault: male victims are judged more harshly than female victims whereas findings regarding sexual orientation and ethnicity are less consistent (Harris & Cook, 1994; Harrison & Esqueda, 2000; Locke & Richman, 1999; Pierce & Harris, 1993; White & Kurpius, 2002). Studies that examined the influence of situational factors found that the harshest judgments were attributed to assailants whose abuse was likely to result in injury (Home, 1994; Katz & Arias, 2001), and to victims who were viewed as being provocative (Harris & Cook, 1994; Home, 1994; Pavlou & Knowles, 2001; Pierce & Harris, 1993; West & Wandrei, 2002), had been drinking (Harrison & Esqueda, 2000), or had been previously victimized by an intimate partner (Harrison & Abrishami, 2004; Wandrei & Rupert, 2000). Others have examined the effect of respondent characteristics and found that men often assign more blame to, or have less sympathy for, the victim than do women (Bryant & Spencer, 2003; Labine, 2001; Langhinrichsen-Rohling, Shlien-Dellinger, Huss, & Kramer, 2004; Locke & Richman, 1999; Pierce & Harris, 1993; West & Wandrei, 2002). However, some researchers have found no such effect of gender after controlling for age and education (Delgado & Bond, 1993). Findings from these vignette studies indicate that the context of an IPV incident, and to some extent characteristics of the respondent, can have an impact on attributions about IPV.
Although most of the aforementioned studies used a factorial vignette design, several important limitations exist in the assessment of social norms. First, the number of contextual variables examined and the number of categories for each often were quite limited. Second, gender was the only respondent characteristic commonly assessed. And third, convenience samples of white, middle-class college students were typical. Each of these limitations leaves important questions about relevant social norms: namely, which characteristics influence these judgments most, and how might these judgments differ in a more diverse, community-based sample?
Of further importance, an assessment of norms should go beyond examinations of fault, or causal responsibility, and also examine expectations for responsibility to solve the problem. Although it is clear that IPV is considered "wrong" by the general public in the United States, support for formal intervention is not ubiquitous and recommended actions may be contingent on characteristics of the abuse (Klein, Campbell, Soler, & Ghez, 1997; Simon et al., 2001; Taylor & Sorenson, 2004). This conditional nature of norms can translate into different definitions, solutions, and outcomes, and therefore has much practical relevance for IPV intervention and prevention. For example, although a population might agree unequivocally that rape in general is wrong, characteristics of the persons involved and details of the incident can determine whether or not a specific incident is defined as rape and how it is responded to (Bourque, 1989; Hannon, Hall, Nash, Formati, & Hopson, 2000) both formally (e.g., in criminal and civil trials) and informally through personal social networks; the nature of the latter response is the focus in the current study.
The present study is designed to assess and examine informal social norms regarding IPV and may inform intervention and prevention strategies designed to alter such norms. To this end, this study has four primary aims: (1) assess attributions of fault for IPV (i.e., causal responsibility), (2) assess attributions of responsibility to do something about the IPV (i.e., solution responsibility), (3) assess respondents' suggestions for how the victim and assailant could make things better, and (4) examine the contingency of each of these judgments on multiple contextual and respondent characteristics simultaneously. The contextual characteristics included victim and assailant traits and conditions (i.e., gender, sexual orientation, age, ethnicity, nativity, occupational status, and relationship status), which were examined to uncover potential biases that certain persons might face, as well as situational characteristics; the latter were examined to better understand the influence of perceived victim provocation (i.e., "motivation"), risk of harm to the victim (i.e., weapon use, abuse type, alcohol use, and frequency of the incident), and the presence of children on IPV attributions. Limitations of previous studies, with regard to norm assessment, will be addressed by combining the benefits of an experimental vignette design with those of a large and diverse community-based survey.
METHOD
Participants
Data were gathered from six samples of adult populations in California. The first, a cross-sectional sample of the state, was obtained using a statewide random digit dial (RDD) sampling frame of 29,000 residential telephone numbers. Five additional samples were obtained using RDD sampling frames of residential telephone numbers from block groups and census tracts known to have high concentrations of African Americans, Hispanics, Korean Americans, Vietnamese Americans, and other Asian Americans. (Asian immigrants are a rapidly growing portion of the population, and California has a higher proportion of Asians in the population than any other state in the continental United States [The Asian Population: 2000. Census 2000 Brief]. We over-sampled within the two largest Asian groups that would most likely be under-represented if the survey was not provided in their native language. We expected African Americans, Hispanics, and Whites to be well-represented with the provision of an English or Spanish language survey.) The final sample of 3,679 California adults consists of roughly equal proportions of each of these ethnic groups and White respondents (see Table I), allowing for more efficient statistical comparisons. A majority of the sample was foreign-born and had been in the United States for 14 years on average. The mean respondent age was 41 years and most were women, worked full-time, and lived in urban areas. The sample was diverse in relationship and family status, educational background, and income level.
Vignette and Questionnaire Development, Design, and Coding
A panel of community-based experts in IPV, comprised survivors of IPV, founders and directors of battered women's shelters and rape crisis services that serve the ethnic communities under study, and the creator of a public awareness campaign about rape, informed the development of a questionnaire that was both relevant to and consistent with community-based practice. In particular, the panel helped to select the contextual factors we examined and helped to ensure the cultural competence of the questionnaire. For example, they identified assailant and victim names and key words and concepts (e.g., shame, disrespect) used in the vignettes.
The questionnaire included seven vignettes: four portrayed adult IPV with a male assailant and a female victim, one portrayed adult IPV with a female assailant and a male victim, one portrayed adult IPV with a same-sex couple (50% of the couples were women and 50% were men), and one portrayed adolescent dating violence with a male assailant and a female victim. Each vignette was composed of randomly assigned categories from up to sixteen contextual characteristics about the victim, assailant, and situation (see Table II). Ethnicity, nativity, occupational status, and alcohol use could vary between victim and assailant; however, age did not vary between the two. When the respondent was of Asian ancestry, six victim and assailant ethnic/national origin categories were used to test for effects of particular Asian heritage on judgments; otherwise, four ethnicities were used (see "Ethnicity" in Table II). Each vignette described one of nine possible behaviors against a current or former intimate partner (see "Abuse type" in Table II). To illustrate, the following is a sample vignette:
Teresa, a 35-year-old Latino woman is an office administrator and born outside the U.S. but has been here a long time. She is living with Rick, a White man of the same age who is a medical doctor and is U.S. born. One evening he accused her of cheating on him. Then he pulled out a gun and pressured her to have sex. No children were around during this incident. Before this incident occurred, he had two drinks and she drank heavily. This was one of many times that an incident like this had happened between them.
After each vignette, respondents were asked:
1. "Who do you think is most at fault, that is, who is most responsible, in this situation?"
* Four response options were read to the respondent: [assailant's name] should, [victim's name] should, they both should, or they...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
have been removed from this article.
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