The Efficacy of a Spouse Abuse Model in Accounting for Courtship Violence

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Abstract
A model consisting of social class, the balance of resources between partners, and experience with violence in the family of orientation—factors that have the greatest salience to spouse abuse—was tested on a sample of 484 white college students, most of whom were currently or previously involved in heterosexual relationships. For males, only being punished harshly as a child was significantly related to inflicting violence on a partner, while being the recipient of violence from a partner was related to both being punished harshly and seeing one's mother hit one's father. For females, the only significant effect was that females who believed that they should have control over the male in a relationship were more likely to be violent with a partner. It is suggested that models based on marital violence may have limited predictive power in accounting for violence during courtship.

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