Familial Risk and Dowry Demand: Are they Causal Factors for Physical and Psychological Violence among Women? A Structural Equation Modeling

Background: In India, studies dealt with domestic violence have used linear or logistic regression to present risk factors. These methods do not allow studying the impact of intermediate variables on the path which could exert indirect or mediation effects on the outcome. This study investigated the direct and indirect effects of familial risk and dowry demand on physical and psychological violence through the mediating variables: alcohol use, women characteristics and social support. Study design: A population-based, cross-sectional household survey was conducted at seven sites in six states across India, based on 9938 women. Methods: Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Structural equation models were used to investigate the associations of familial risk, dowry demand and mediating variable use with physical and psychological violence. Models were assessed using goodness of fit statistics. Results: The direct and indirect relationship between familial risk and physical violence with regression coefficient was 0.323 and 0.100 respectively. Similarly, for psychological violence was 0.151 and 0.371 respectively. The dowry demand had indirect effect (0.209) on psychological violence through the mediating variables such as alcohol use, women characteristics, social support and physical violence as compared to direct effects (0.112). The model fit statistics had a moderately good fit with RMSEA=0.09, Chi square with p<0.001 and CFI 0.87. Conclusion: Despite the fact that the women were exposed to abuse during childhood period the mediating variables such as social support, women characteristics and Husbands alcohol use etc., have a significant role to play to contain the both physical and psychological violence.