The Gender Violence - Implicit Association Test to measure attitudes toward intimate partner violence against women

Attitudes play a central role in intimate partner violence against women and are related to its origin, to the responses of women who suffer violence, and to the settings where it occurs. In fact, these attitudes are recognized as one of the risk factors linked to violent perpetration and to public, professional, and victim responses to this type of violence. However, even though available research generally shows a broad rejection of this violence, it remains a serious social and health problem that has reached epidemic proportions. This suggests that the information available about these attitudes (obtained through explicit and direct measures, i.e., self-reports) may be distorted or influenced by factors such as social desirability. In this context, the overall objective of our research project is to provide multi-method measures (explicit and implicit) of attitudes toward intimate partner violence against women, and the main goal of this paper is to propose an instrument for the implicit measurement of these attitudes. In this regard, the Implicit Association Test (IAT) is the most common procedure used, providing a superior predictive validity compared to explicit measures for socially sensitive topics. We will present an exploratory study that describes its adaptation for our purposes, and the development of the Gender Violence - Implicit Association Test (GV-IAT) to use among Spanish-speaking populations, and discuss the strengths and limitations of this proposal.

El acoso sexual en el ámbito universitario: análisis de una escala de medida / Sexual Harassment in the University: Analysis of a Measurement Scale

El objetivo de este trabajo es analizar las características de la Escala de acoso sexual e interacción social de contenido sexual en el ámbito universitario (EASIS -U). Se diseñó un cuestionario para el estudio de sus componentes que incluye 38 ítems que describen diferentes comportamientos de interacción social de contenido sexual y de acoso sexual. El instrumento fue administrado a 1693 personas (1521 estudiantes y 172 miembros del personal) de una universidad española. Los resultados indican que el cuestionario está constituido por cuatro factores que explican el 61.81 % de la varianza total y evalúan comportamientos de chantaje sexual (Escala 1), acoso sexual de componente verbal (Escala 2) y físico (Escala 3) e interacción social de contenido sexual (Escala 4) en el ámbito académico, con datos de consistencia interna favorables (a entre 0.962 y 0.775). Estos resultados recomiendan el uso de la escala en futuras investigaciones.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the characteristics of the Scale of sexual harassment and social interaction of sexual content at the University, a questionnaire of 38 items that was administered to 1693 people (1521 students and 172 staff members) of a Spanish university. The results indicate that the questionnaire used consists of four factors explaining 61.81% of the total variance and evaluate sexual blackmail behaviors (Scale 1), sexual harassment verbal component (Scale 2) and physical (Scale 3) and social interaction of sexual content (Scale 4) in academia with a favourable reliability data (a between 0.962 and 0.775). Based on the results is recommended the use of the scale in future research on the subject.