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.

Read more about this topic:  Conflict Tactics Scale

Famous quotes containing the word criticism:

    When you overpay small people you frighten them. They know that their merits or activities entitle them to no such sums as they are receiving. As a result their boss soars out of economic into magic significance. He becomes a source of blessings rather than wages. Criticism is sacrilege, doubt is heresy.
    Ben Hecht (1893–1964)

    I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.
    Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)

    The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.
    Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)