Associations of Attitudes and Social Norms with Experiences of Intimate Partner Violence among Married Adolescents and Their Husbands in Rural Niger: A Dyadic Cross-sectional Study

"Interest in social norms research has increased rapidly over the past several years, as health and development researchers realize that individual-based approaches may be insufficient in contexts in which behaviors are determined by broader social forces."

Prior cross-sectional research suggests that both men's and women's attitudes towards intimate partner violence (IPV) are predictive of women's IPV experience, although association can vary greatly by context. Studies that investigate these dynamics often conflate attitudes with social norms or use attitudes as a proxy for social norms, given that valid measures on social norms are usually lacking. This study used dyadic survey data from adolescent wives and their husbands living in rural Niger to help understand how IPV-related attitudes, norms, and behaviours intersect in a highly gender-inequitable setting.

Social norms specific to particular behaviours are often sustained through culturally specific gender norms. Gender norms for women might intersect, particularly in highly patriarchal contexts, with local cultural models associating women with submissiveness, reliability, and servitude. The distinction between attitudes and norms is important, as people might have a negative individual attitude towards a given behaviour, and yet, with the goal of seeking others' approval, engage in that behaviour nonetheless. In this study, norms are defined as individuals' beliefs about (i) how others in their groups behave (descriptive norms) and (ii) what behaviours those others approve of (injunctive norms).

Dyadic data were collected from a representative sample of married adolescent girls (aged 13-19) and their husbands in 48 rural villages of the Dosso region of Niger (n = 1,010). Analyses used logistic regression on dyadic observations, including both husbands' and wives' measures, to assess the odds of a wife reporting having ever experienced IPV given the attitudinal and normative predictors plus sociodemographic covariates.

Participants in this survey rated their communities as highly gender inequitable, with strongly segregated gender roles. Eight percent of women in the sample reported IPV. The researchers found that wives who have reported IPV are more likely to report attitudes in support of IPV, while for husbands whose wives report IPV, that relationship is insignificant. Existing evidence suggests that girls and women who are exposed to family violence as children are more likely to be victims of IPV as adults. In other words, women who have grown up experiencing or witnessing violence may see it as normal, so when violence occurs within their own relationships, they might be more likely to express attitudes accepting of it.

When husbands agreed that people in their community believed there were times when a woman deserves to be beaten, their wives had 2.08 times the odds (95% confidence interval (CI) 1.13-3.81) of reporting spousal IPV than when husbands disagreed, while for wives there is no association between the community norm and IPV reporting. Wives who report that people in their community hold inequitable gender norms in general are more likely to have experienced IPV, while for husbands, community gender norms are not predictive of whether their wives have reported IPV.

Thus, the findings suggest that social norms regarding IPV - independent of individual attitudes - may be important determinants of IPV perpetration, indicating that measures focused solely on individual attitudes may be insufficient to capture higher-order social determinants of IPV within communities.

Per the researchers, the measures used in this study can be improved upon by using items that more explicitly tap into specific constructs from the social norms theoretical framework and by testing them in different settings. Studies such as this one can also be strengthened through the use of social network data collection and analytic techniques that provide more resolution in the identification of the social reference groups that are salient for specific behaviours.

In conclusion, the results provide "evidence that perceptions of community expectations regarding IPV are related to this violence as a behavior, indicating that interventions that attempt to address IPV may be unlikely to succeed without addressing broader community-level social expectations." In other words, targeting and assessment of social norms are likely critical to advancing understanding and prevention of IPV.