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Abstract
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We appreciate Kathryn M Yount and colleagues for these insightful comments on our Article.1
First, following established practices in multicountry studies, we performed trend analysis and presented results at overall, regional, income, and country levels for a more comprehensive and multiperspective assessment.
Considering the same concerns as Yount and colleagues, we applied the average annual rate of change using Poisson regression with robust error variance for countries with at least two surveys, mitigating the effect of different survey timepoints. Additionally, we have focused more on reporting and discussing country-level results and highlighted the heterogeneity and uniqueness of countries, emphasising the need for careful interpretation and attention to context-specific factors.
Second, we thank Yount and colleagues for confirming psychological intimate partner violence (IPV) in their analysis. In addressing controlling behaviours, we made intentional efforts to improve comparability across countries and years. Our efforts to improve comparability across countries and years involved using identical items and restricting survey years to the most recent two decades. We acknowledge the challenge in achieving complete measurement invariance across diverse cultural and temporal contexts, as highlighted in our limitations--the conceptualisation, definition, and measurement of psychological IPV present inherent complexities. Despite these challenges, our Article reports high prevalence and increasing trend in psychological IPV, underscoring the need for heightened public awareness and concerted efforts to refine measurements. We recognise the importance of ongoing work to ensure the reliability of cross-country, cross-time comparisons and are committed to advancing these efforts for future research.
Third, our measurement and report of IPV was based on data accessibility and previous Demographic and Health Surveys studies.5
Furthermore, physical and sexual IPV were also the most commonly reported types in other studies, and their items used were similar to those in Demographic and Health Surveys. We understand Yount and colleagues' concerns about content validity and composition of Demographic and Health Surveys IPV items, and we agree that some items mentioned should also be assessed. However, as in our discussion on psychological IPV, this requires...
Language: en |