Jeffrey M. Ackerman

Gender Gap Trends for Violent Crimes, 1980 to 2003 A UCR-NCVS Comparison

The authors examine 1980 to 2003 trends in female-to-male interpersonal violence reported in Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) arrest statistics and National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) victimization data. Augmented Dickey-Fuller time-series techniques and intuitive plot displays show much overlap yet differences in each source’s portrayal of trends in female violence levels and the gender gap. Both sources show little or no change in the gender gap for homicide and rape/sexual assault, whereas UCR police counts show a sharp rise in female-to-male arrests for criminal assault during the past one to two decades—but that rise is not borne out in NCVS counts. Net-widening policy shifts have apparently escalated the arrest proneness of females for “criminal assault” (e.g., policing physical attacks/threats of marginal seriousness that women in relative terms are more likely to commit); rather than women having become any more violent, official data increasingly mask differences in violent offending by men and women.

A meta‐analysis of the relationship between social skills and sexual offenders

A meta‐analysis examined eleven studies examining the relationship between social skills (communication competence) and whether the person was a sexual offender (rapist, molester, incest offender, pedophile, exhibitionist). After the removal of one study due to methodological reasons, the remaining ten studies provide a homogeneous set of effects demonstrating that sexual offenders possess fewer social skills than nonoffenders (r = .334). Results of the meta‐analysis offer insight into the role communication skills plays in understanding the nature of sexual offenders.

The Relevance of Relationship Satisfaction and Continuation to the Gender Symmetry Debate

In prior research, Ackerman and Field (2011) found that intimate partner violence (IPV) affects the relationship satisfaction of females more than the relationship satisfaction of males. The current research replicated those findings on a different sample of men and women. In addition to confirming past findings, it also found that gendered patterns in IPV differed substantially for current versus former relationships. Subsequent analyses indicated that gendered differences in whether relationships are continued or terminated after IPV apparently explained these patterns. The current analyses illustrate how relationship continuation differences across gender can produce sample selection biases that substantially affect conclusions about whether partner violence is perpetrated equally by men and women. More specifically, the results of this research are consistent with the conclusion that female IPV victims are more likely than are male victims to become dissatisfied with aggressive opposite-sex partnerships and subsequently terminate their aggressive relationships. For this reason, research that relies only upon the analysis of current relationships will underestimate the amount of partner violence committed by men.

The gender asymmetric effect of intimate partner violence on relationship satisfaction

Our research examined the association between intimate partner violence and relationship satisfaction among victims. The negative association between victimization and relationship satisfaction was substantially stronger for females than for males. Comparisons between respondents reporting about same-sex relationships with those reporting about opposite-sex relationships provided evidence that the amplified victimization/satisfaction association among female victims is a victim-gender effect rather than an actor-gender effect. In other words, our findings suggest that aggression harms the quality of the intimate partnerships of females much more so than the partnerships of males regardless of whether a male or a female is the perpetrator. We supplemented dialogue about the direct implications of our findings with discussions about how these results may raise conceptual questions about the adequacy of the instruments scholars use to study partner aggression.

Ethnic Group Differences in Police Notification About Intimate Partner Violence

We analyzed data from the National Crime Victimization Survey to test whether individuals from different ethnic groups differentially notify the police after incidents of partner violence. After finding that minority groups notified the police about intimate partner violence (IPV) events more than non-minorities, we found that socioeconomic status differences between minorities and non-minorities explained a statistically significant proportion of the reasons underlying the differences in notification. We suggest that the pattern of our results supports a structural perspective and has potential implications about the subjective and objective efficacy of police involvement in IPV.

Assessing Conflict Tactics Scale validity by examining intimate partner violence overreporting.

Objective: Although many scholars have questioned, on a logical basis, the validity of the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS) to adequately measure intimate partner violence (IPV), relatively few critiques have used extensive empirical data gathered specifically for this purpose. This research analyzed these types of data to investigate an important mechanism of potential validity problems, IPV misreporting, by adding context questions to determine whether participants endorsed (as if actual IPV) accidents or other acts that neither party took seriously. The objective was to determine not only the extent to which this form of overreporting occurs but also how males and females differed in misreporting patterns. Method: Students from 1 U.S. and 1 Australian university (Total N = 1,758) completed a computer-administered survey. Multilevel logistic regression subsequently assessed the degree to which several factors predicted whether participants overreported CTS items. Results: Of the 1,174 event endorsements, 22.1% were classified as overreports. Whether males or females were more prone to overreporting, however, differed across event type, sample, age, relationship status, perpetration versus victimization, and current versus former partnerships. There were statistically significant interactions between gender and many of these factors. Among the most important of the findings was that males were more likely to overreport victimizations by female partners, whereas females were more likely to overreport perpetrations against male partners. Conclusions: The magnitude and intricate gendered nature of the overreporting problem imply that overreporting is a substantial problem, having the potential to negatively affect scale validity and thus the testing of partner-violence theories.