Conflict Tactics Scale - Criticism

Criticism

Critics of the CTS argue that the scales count acts of violence but do not provide information about the context in which items occur (including the initiation, intention, history, or pattern of violence) and therefore may misrepresent the characteristics of violence between partners. A major criticism is that the CTS does not include sexual assault in its definition of family conflict, thus excluding a prominent form of spousal abuse. Another common criticism is that the introduction of the CTS carries ideological assumptions about domestic violence, such as the notion that partner violence as the result of an "argument" rather than an attempt to control one's partner. Furthermore, the CTS asks about frequency only in the past twelve months and fails to detect ongoing systematic patterns of abuse. Another methodological flaw is that the CTS excludes incidents of violence that occur after separation and divorce, a time in which most spouse-on-spouse assaults occur. The CTS also does not measure economic abuse, manipulation involving children, isolation, or intimidation – all common measures of violence from a victim-advocacy perspective. Moreover, response bias may occur and CTS does not factor in the cases of nonrespondents. These elements are typically difficult to measure but nevertheless important to understanding violence.

Other methodological issues with the CTS include that interobserver reliability (the likelihood that the two members of the measured dyad respond similarly) is near zero for tested husband and wife couples. That is, the chances of a given couple reporting similar answers about events they both experienced is no greater than chance. On the most severe CTS items, husband-wife agreement is actually below chance:

On the item "beat up," concordance was nil: although there were respondents of both sexes who claimed to have administered beatings and respondents of both sexes who claimed to have been on the receiving end, there was not a single couple in which one party claimed to have administered and the other to have received such a beating.