Measurement of supportive attitudes towards intimate partner violence against women among a Spanish-speaker sample

Intimate partner violence is the most common type of violence against women. Attitudes towards this violence are increasingly recognized as key to understanding this social and public health problem because a social environment that accepts or even supports it creates a climate that breeds further violence and encourages their perpetration. The evidence available shows that these attitudes are influenced by different individual, organizational and community factors, and that the supportive attitudes are generally more common among males, and among older and less educated people. This paper presents two cross-sectional studies which aim to obtain a deeper understanding of supportive attitudes towards intimate partner violence against women in a Spanish-speakers context. Results obtained show that the two questionnaires used may be useful for evaluating supporting attitudes towards this violence in Spanish-speaking samples. Thus, the Inventory of Distorted Thoughts about Women and Violence (IPDMV), one of the one of the most widely used tools to this aim among Spanish-speakers, includes information regarding the minimization of this violence and the responsibility of perpetrators, and it seems better able to capture the effect of previous training, which would be consistent with the fact that it was initially designed to detect the effects of interventions; and the Inventory of Beliefs about Intimate Partner Violence (IBIPV), a new tool recently designed to this aim, is more focused on supportive attitudes and seems more effective for capturing differences between men and women in blaming victims and exonerating perpetrators. Additionally, the results obtained allow us to complement previous studies on the effects that factors such as gender, age, or previous training have on supportive attitudes towards intimate partner violence against women.