{"id":922,"date":"2004-06-21T04:32:22","date_gmt":"2004-06-21T12:32:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2004\/06\/21\/do-evangelical-men-beat-their-wives-less\/"},"modified":"2004-06-21T04:32:22","modified_gmt":"2004-06-21T12:32:22","slug":"do-evangelical-men-beat-their-wives-less","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=922","title":{"rendered":"Do Evangelical Men Beat Their Wives Less?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Researcher Brad Wilcox’s new book, Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands<\/i>, <\/a>has been getting some coverage (especially but not exclusively in right-wing and Christian news outlets), and I imagine will get a lot more in the weeks to come. (See, for example, Maggie Gallagher<\/a>, David Warren<\/a>, and USA Today<\/a>). (Many links via the Family Scholars Blog, where Tom Sylvester <\/a>wrote an impressively mean and unfair comment about Scott Coltrane).<\/p>\n

One claim that I’ve seen over and over is that Wilcox’s work shows that “Evangelical Protestant wives whose husbands attend church regularly reported the lowest levels of domestic violence of any major religious or secular group studied.” In other words, attending evangelical church makes guys less likely to beat their wives.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, I can’t afford a copy of Wilcox’s book, nor does my library have a copy. So I could be entirely wrong about this. But from what I can tell, while Wilcox may be right to say that Evangelical dads spend more time with their kids and are terrific fathers, his study is worthless when it comes to measuring domestic violence.<\/p>\n

According to the official press release<\/a>, Dr. Wilcox’s book draws its data from “two well-regarded, national social surveys, the General Social Survey (1990-98), and the National Survey of Families and Households (1987-88 and 1992-94).”<\/p>\n

The General Social Survey doesn’t include any data on respondents as victims or perpetrators of intimate violence, so we can ignore the GSS. The National Survey of Families and Households does ask about intimate violence, so Dr. Wilcox must have depended on the NSFH to draw his conclusions about intimate violence and church attendance. (This isn’t an original approach, by the way; Christopher Ellison, in particular, reached the same conclusion from the same data source years ago. See “Religious Involvement and Domestic Violence,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion<\/i>, June 2001).<\/p>\n

The NSFH is an excellent research tool for many things, but it’s lousy for measuring domestic violence.<\/p>\n

1. The NSFH doesn’t make it safe for victims to answer questions.<\/b><\/p>\n

First of all, the NSFH is terrible when it comes to giving respondents a private, safe way to answer the survey – but respondent safety and privacy is paramount when you’re trying to measure intimate violence. To give you an idea of how bad it is, sometimes the NSFH researchers will interview a husband, but if the wife is unavailable they’ll just leave her survey behind<\/i>, to be completed and picked up a few days later.<\/p>\n

Okay, now imagine that the husband is an abuser. He’s taken the survey, so he knows it includes questions about violence between spouses. The surveyors leave a blank questionnaire for his wife, and ask him to pretty please make sure she fills it out in total privacy, so she’s free to answer honestly. What are the odds a woman in that situation will actually be free to answer survey questions about how often her husband abuses her honestly? I’d put them somewhere between zil and none.<\/p>\n

2. The NSFH’s questions aren’t well written to accurately measure intimate violence.<\/b><\/p>\n

It would take a lot of space to describe everything researchers have learned in the past two decades about how to design interviews about intimate violence; suffice it to say that the NSFH gets everything wrong.<\/p>\n

For instance, the NSFH doesn’t even ask about rape and sexual abuse – meaning that a major area of intimate violence is ignored. The NSFH asks about violence exclusively in the context of arguments that turn violent, ignoring instances of violence not preceded by an argument. The NSFH asks very few questions, and the questions each cover multiple possible events; research has shown that respondents are more likely to report intimate violence if they’re asked a longer series of more specific questions.<\/p>\n

3. The NSFH isn’t useful for measuring alcohol use and abuse.<\/b><\/p>\n

According to a study similar to Dr. Wilcox’s, and using the exact same data source, “respondents in the NSFH were asked whether they experience problems with alcohol or drug usage.” (“Religious Involvement and Domestic Violence,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion<\/i>, June 2001.) As far as I can tell, that’s it. Asking the question so bluntly and crudely isn’t likely to bring about honest answers, and even when respondents answer honestly, the data given is too crude to be very useful.<\/p>\n

Why does this matter? Because, statistically, the more alcohol people drink, the more likely they are to be involved with domestic violence; and<\/i>, the more often people go to church, the less likely they are to drink. The least likely drinkers (aside from total abstainers) are evangelical protestants who go to church weekly. This means that the causation suggested by Dr. Wilcox may not be causation at all, but just a correlation caused by the fact that heavy drinkers don’t go to church much.<\/p>\n

A 2002 study published in The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion <\/i>also looked for a connection between religious affiliation and intimate violence; but unlike Dr. Wilcox’s data source, this study asked respondents detailed questions about “11 alcohol-dependence symptoms and 15 drinking-related social consequences,” which means that this study’s data on alcohol consumption was far more useful and accurate.<\/p>\n

(Also, it didn’t make the mistake of conflating alcohol use with other drug use – for example, while alcohol increases the odds of intimate violence, pot-smoking may actually decrease those odds. That means that any study of intimate violence that conflates alcohol and pot usage is, frankly, hash.)<\/p>\n

The results? On first glance, their data appeared to show a connection between going to church every week and low rates of intimate violence. Using a multivariate (that’s a mathematical means of measuring the importance of multiple variables) analysis, however, the results looked quite different. “For men, the results indicate that weekly religious attendance and importance of religion was not associated with increased or decreased risk of [intimate violence] perpetration. Instead, men who reported alcohol problems were at a fourfold increased risk of [intimate violence] perpetration compared to men who did not report alcohol problems.”<\/p>\n

(“Religious affiliation, denominational homogeny, and intimate partner violence,” in Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion<\/i>, Mar 2002, Vol. 41, Issue 1)<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

I don’t completely dismiss Dr. Wilcox’s study. In many cases – for instance, regarding his finding that evangelical men are particularly affectionate towards their children and spend a lot of time with their children – his data sources are probably useful and accurate. Furthermore, I haven’t read Dr. Wilcox’s book, so any critique I make of his work is indirect and must be taken with a grain of salt.<\/p>\n

But the bottom line is, no study relying on the NHFS for information about intimate violence is going to produce meaningful results. Despite the press reports, anything Dr. Wilcox’s study finds about domestic violence can probably be dismissed..<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Researcher Brad Wilcox’s new book, Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands, has been getting some coverage (especially but not exclusively in right-wing and Christian news outlets), and I imagine will get a lot more in the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[96],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rape-intimate-violence-related-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=922"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/922\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}