Attitudes toward domestic violence: Race and gender issues

Previous research has not extensively addressed how attitudes toward domestic violence vary between ethnicities and genders. This experiment utilized domestic violence scenarios with the husband's and wife's ethnicities varied to form four combinations of European-American and African-American couples. Participants were 156 European-American (87 female and 69 male) and 109 African-American (73 female and 36 male) undergraduate introductory psychology students aged 18-24 years. Participants read the scenario and completed 7 questionnaires about their attitudes toward the scenario, domestic violence, and women. Analyses showed that women relative to men blamed the husband more for the abuse, sympathized more with the wife, and rated the incident as more serious, and African-American participants sympathized more with African-American victims. In addition, participants blamed the African-American husband less for the abuse than the European-American husband. Both women and European-Americans, relative to men and African-Americans, had more positive views of women and disapproved more strongly of wife beating. This research demonstrates that participant gender and ethnicity, as well as abuser and victim ethnicity, do have an effect on attitudes toward domestic violence.