Cumulative Risk and Intimate Partner Aggression

Objective: Intimate partner aggression (IPA) is recognized as a serious challenge to public health, and numerous models specify individual, interpersonal, and contextual antecedents of relationally aggressive behavior. The present study aims to synthesize previous work by determining whether the accumulation of selected factors at these 3 levels of analysis, when considered simultaneously, predicts IPA. Method: We collected self-report, observational, and social network data from 462 newlywed spouses (231 couples) from low-income neighborhoods at 3 separate time points across the first 18 months of marriage. Results: Latent growth curve analyses showed that individual and relational risks were consistently related to IPA initial status (i.e., intercepts), for husbands and wives. Effects of contextual risk on IPA were less consistent. All risk indices were unrelated to 18-month changes in IPA. Furthermore, individual and dyadic deficits increased risk for IPA independent of partners' contextual risk. Conclusions: Even after adjusting for potential distal influences, individual and dyadic variables emerge as clear risk factors of IPA. Although there were no significant associations between contextual variables and IPA intercepts and slopes in latent growth curve modeling, we did find evidence for correlations between all 3 facets of risk. In light of this co-occurrence of risk across various domains, we recommend locating interventions that target individual and relational risk (e.g., therapies addressing neurotic tendencies and couple therapy with a communication skills training component), specifically within higher risk environments.