Critical Synthesis Package: Inventory of Beliefs About Wife Beating (IBWB)

Abstract

Abstract This Critical Synthesis Package contains: (1) a Critical Analysis of the psychometric properties and the application to health science education of the Inventory of Beliefs about Wife Beating (IBWB); and (2) a copy of the short and long forms of the IBWB developed by Daniel Saunders, PhD. The IBWB is a self-administered instrument with 31 items, divided into five subscales: Wife Beating is Justified (WJ), Wives Gain from Beatings (WG), Help Should be Given (HG), Offender is Responsible (OR), and Offender should be Punished (OP). Two other versions of the scale exist; an 11-item short form and a 24-item Sympathy for Battered Wives scale. Subscale scores and a total scale score can be calculated. Lower scores on WJ and WG, and higher scores on HG, OP, and OR indicate less favorable attitudes toward wife abuse. The IBWB demonstrated convergent validity with measures of rape, domestic violence, traditional gender roles, and attitudes toward women, known-groups validity with domestic violence offenders and non-offenders, students, and women's advocates, and discriminant validity with measures of general personality traits. While the IBWB has been used in some research on health science learners and health professionals in the United States, most of this research has been conducted internationally and suggests that health professions students in more patriarchal cultures have more favorable attitudes toward wife abuse. As studies on the IBWB have been primarily cross-sectional in nature, longitudinal studies examining effects of educational or psychological interventions to improve attitudes toward wife abuse among health professionals and students are needed.

Keywords

• Domestic Violence
• Attitude
• DREAM
• Directory and Repository of Educational Assessment Measures
• Validity of Results