Zimbabwean Women’s Attitudes Toward Wife-Beating and Associated Factors: A Latent Class Analysis

This paper sought to identify distinct classes of women who endorse wife-beating and the determinants of such justification to broaden current knowledge of the correlates of intimate partner violence in Zimbabwe. We drew on survey data from the 2015 Zimbabwe Demographic and Health Survey (ZDHS) and restricted our analytical sample to 2,966 currently partnered women. To classify women’s responses into patterns of tolerant attitudes, we used latent class analysis, an unsupervised classification method that helps identify heterogeneity in a population using observable variables. The data supported a three-class solution characterized by the following probabilities: class 1, high tolerance (6%); class 2, moderate tolerance (26%); and class 3, low tolerance (66%). The results from the regression analysis suggest that older age, reading a newspaper frequently, and having more than primary education were negatively associated with membership in the moderate and high tolerance classes. Women who made joint decisions or had no say in their healthcare issues were more likely to belong to the moderate and high tolerance classes. In other words, tolerant attitudes toward wife-beating were negatively associated with personal empowerment. Therefore, interventions that increase personal empowerment in the form of education and access to media might be needed to redress the endemic acceptance of wife-beating in Zimbabwe. At the same time, gender role transformative interventions are required to challenge patriarchal thinking, which denies women decision-making autonomy and perpetuates attitudes that encourage marital violence. Plain language summary This paper focuses on a well-known but under-researched correlate of intimate partner violence in Zimbabwe: attitudes toward wife beating. We argue that such attitudes reflect dominant social norms and that understanding them can help shed light on the intergenerational cycles of violence. To better understand these attitudes, we use a classification approach which allows us to identify subgroups that are qualitatively different from each other based on their tolerance of wife beating. Using this classification, we also sought to understand the factors associated with Zimbabwean women’s acceptance of violence. Our findings revealed three distinct classes, which we defined as high, moderate and low tolerance. In terms of associations, we found that personal empowerment factors such as age, education and media access were signif