Validation of the psychological maltreatment of women inventory for Chinese women

Abstract

Problem statement: There exist a number of instruments on psychological dimensions of IPV. However, there is no such measure for use in Chinese populations. Purpose: This research study aims to validate the Psychological Maltreatment of Women Inventory (PMWI) for Chinese women. Methods: The validation was conducted in two phases: (a) preparation of the Revised Chinese PMWI and (b) full psychometric testing. In the preparation phase, the PMWI was first revised taking into account the possible cultural differences between Chinese and non-Chinese women. 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 experts in Hong Kong for the relevance of items to Chinese women. 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. The second phase of the validation process was the full psychometric testing of the Revised Chinese PMWI, which included 1198 Chinese women who had been in intimate relationships during the preceding 12 months. Results: Regarding test-retest reliability, the intraclass correlation coefficient was over 0.95. The Cronbach’s alphas for each subscale and the entire tool were above 0.9. 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 of known differences. Moreover, convergent validity was established through moderate-to-strong correlations of the questionnaire with measures assessing other forms of IPV, controlling behaviors, marital satisfaction, and depression. Implications: The present study provided evidence for both cultural appropriateness and satisfactory psychometric properties of the Revised Chinese PMWI, allowing better understanding and measurement of psychological maltreatment in Chinese women.