Validation of the psychological maltreatment of women inventory for Chinese women

Abstract

In view of the lack of a culture-specific tool to measure psychological maltreatment comprehensively in Chinese women, this research study aims to validate the Psychological Maltreatment of Women Inventory (PMWI) for Chinese women.

The validation was conducted in two phases: (a) preparation of the Revised Chinese PMWI and (b) full psychometric testing of the questionnaire. In the preparation phase, the PMWI was first revised taking into account the possible cultural differences between Chinese and non-Chinese women. In addition, given the changing nature of psychological maltreatment with the advent of mobile digital devices, supplementary items were added to keep the instrument in line with the expanding scope of this phenomenon. The revised PMWI included 67 items after revision, and was translated into Chinese by two bilingual translators using forward and back translation. The Revised Chinese PMWI was reviewed by a panel of intimate partner violence (IPV) experts in Hong Kong for the relevance of items to Chinese women, resulting in the scale-level content validity index of 0.94, which indicated the content validity was satisfactory. After adjustment of items based on the experts’ opinions, cognitive debriefing was conducted with a sample of 10 Chinese women to confirm the comprehensibility of the Revised Chinese PMWI by the target population. The last step in the preparation phase was assessment of test-retest reliability of the questionnaire among 37 Chinese women with a 2-week interval, which was shown to be satisfactory with an intraclass correlation coefficient over 0.95.

The second phase of the validation process was the full psychometric testing of the Revised Chinese PMWI. The validation study included 1198 Chinese women who had been in intimate relationships during the preceding 12 months. Based on exploratory factor analysis, the questionnaire was reduced to 49 items. The test revealed two factors as the original English version, emotional-verbal and dominance-isolation, which were further verified by confirmatory factor analysis. In addition, known-groups validity was demonstrated by significant differences in scores between women recruited from different places (shelter as opposed to community center) and with different abuse histories (abused in past year, not abused but in distressed in relationships, or not abused in satisfactory relationships). Moreover, convergent validity was established through moderate-to-strong correlations of the Revised Chinese PMWI with measures assessing other forms of IPV, controlling behaviors, marital satisfaction, and depression. Trivial correlation with unrelated demographic variables (number of children and education level) indicated discriminant validity. Regarding reliability, the Revised Chinese PMWI showed good internal consistency. Cronbach’s alpha for each subscale ranged from 0.947 to 0.966 and was 0.975 for the entire tool.

The use of the comprehensive validation procedures in the present study provided evidence for both cultural appropriateness and satisfactory psychometric properties of the Revised Chinese PMWI. It shows promise as a useful instrument in research and clinical practice to measure the experience of psychological maltreatment in intimate relationships in Chinese women.