Differentiating compliance and verbal coercion: A mixed methods content validity study

Verbal coercion, a form of sexual violence, is a common problem that is related to various psychological and physical outcomes. Cognitive interviewing is an important technique used to understand how people perceive items on a questionnaire. The current study utilized cognitive interviewing and sought to examine the content validity of a potentially ambiguous item, "my partner insisted on sex", from the Revised Conflict Tactics Scales, a measure of intimate partner violence. Participants were mostly college students at a local Midwestern University (N = 39). Participants responses were qualitatively coded, and the following themes emerged: coercion (42.68%) (physical (4.88%) and verbal (37.80%)), consent (30.49%), compliance (4.88%), hesitancy to have sex (13.41%), personal experiences (6.10%), and perpetrator's intent (2.44%). The results show that most participants viewed the item, "partner insisted on sex" as a verbally coercive tactic; this theme was mentioned more often than non-coercive themes. Participants were also asked to rate quantitatively how consensual they considered the insistence item, and comparison items representing other tactic types. Three tactics were rated as clearly nonconsensual using a p < .05 standard, including the insistence item (M = 1.946, SD = 1.70) with a range from "0-not consensual at all" to "7-completely consensual". This suggests evidence of consent validity since the item was perceived as representing coercive behavior.