Men who use violence: intimate violence versus non-intimate violence profiles

The current study examined the differences between three types of violent men based on Holtzworth-Munroe and Stuart's (1994) tripartite typology and a group of non-intimate violent men. First, a cluster analysis was conducted on a sample of 91 domestically violent men, resulting in three clusters that approximated the tripartite model for psychopathology as measured by the MMPI-2, that is, non-pathological, borderline/dysphoric, and antisocial. Based on the violence variables (i.e., severity of violence, family-only violence, and exposure to family of origin violence) only severity of violence approximated what would be expected across the three clusters, that is, the less the psychopathology, the less severe the violence. The other two violence variables had approximate frequencies/percentages of occurrence that would be expected for individual typologies with some but not all three typologies. In comparing the three intimate violent typologies to the non-intimate violent group, the non-intimate and non-pathological groups were within normal limits and did not differ significantly on any of the MMPI-2 scales. These non-intimate and non-pathological groups differed significantly from the antisocial and borderline/dysphoric groups on all the scales that defined the psychopathology of these two groups. On the violence variables, the non-intimate groups reported significantly less severe violence than the borderline/dysphoric and antisocial groups.