A Scientific Answer to a Scientific Question: The Gender Debate on Intimate Partner Violence

This article addresses Winstok's critiques and comments on my review and analysis of the status of scientific information on intimate partner violence (IPV). I present some background on the development of the Revised Conflict Tactics Scales (CTS2), an analysis of issues related to the operationalization of gender symmetry in IPV, and an evaluation of the hypotheses put forth by Winstok and others to explain the multimethod divergence in estimates for IPV gender patterns. Happily, we know much more about IPV than we did at the time of the creation and publication of the CTS2 in the mid-1990s, and excellent data can be brought to bear on many of these hypotheses. A scientific evaluation indicates that these hypotheses do not explain all of the data showing multimethod divergence. In some cases, these hypotheses have been repeatedly disconfirmed. On the other hand, increasing amounts of data indicate that choices regarding the operationalization of IPV in surveys have a substantial impact on gender patterns. Fairly simply methodological modifications can improve multimethod convergence. Evidence-based suggestions for measures showing multimethod convergence are provided. The field needs to continue to invest in increasing the scientific precision of violence measures.