Kevin Rushton and Dr. Niwako Yamawaki, Psychology
This study was a secondary analysis of the data collected in Dr. Ridge’s study, “Relationship Conflict in College Students at Utah Universities: Dating Violence Assessment.” That project was a large-scale assessment of dating violence victimization and perpetration in incoming college freshmen and upperclassmen at all ten colleges and universities in Utah, including Brigham Young University. The brief online survey assessed factors associated with dating violence victimization and perpetration, including background and personal factors, self and personality factors (i.e., self-esteem, entitlement), and relationship attitudes and other factors (i.e., attachment).
The purpose of this secondary analysis was to more specifically investigate help-seeking behaviors among Utah college students who are victims of dating violence. A brief set of questions about help-seeking behavior was included in Dr. Ridge’s study; responses to this section were compared to responses from other sections to find correlated and predictors of help-seeking behavior.
Help-seeking behavior was assessed very simply by asking participants if they would report physically or emotionally abusive behavior perpetrated by a dating partner to a variety of sources of help, including the police, family members, and mental health professionals. Participants were also asked if they actually had reported abuse before. This yielded four distinct measures of help-seeking: hypothetical reporting of physical abuse, hypothetical reporting of emotional abuse, actual reporting of physical abuse, and actual reporting of emotional abuse. The actual reports of abuse were unusable for our purposes, because the question was double-barreled; to answer “yes” to those questions they would have had to both 1.) been abused and 2.) reported the abuse. There was no distinction between people who had been abused but not reported it and those who had never been abused to begin with. After evaluating Cronbach’s alpha for the hypothetical reporting of physical (alpha = .84) and emotional (alpha = .755) abuse, we decided to use the questions about physical abuse as our main measure of help-seeking because of the higher internal consistency and more normal distribution (help-seeking for emotional abuse was positively skewed). Responses to the five items were averaged to produce the final help-seeking variable, with one item reverse-scored because it asked whether the person would keep the abuse private between the couple, i.e. not seek any outside help.
Several demographic factors were evaluated for association with help-seeking behavior. We found that the responses of students who were from Utah were not significantly different from those of students who were from other states or other countries. Likewise, responses from LDS students were not significantly different from responses from non-LDS students. Frequency of church attendance (for any religion) also did not predict help-seeking behavior. This suggests (though it does not prove) that data about help-seeking behavior among college students throughout the country can be applied to college students within Utah; the same applies to LDS vs. non-LDS college students. The only demographic factor found to be significant in predicting help-seeking behavior for this population was gender; not surprisingly, women were more likely to report dating violence than men were (p=.000, Cohen’s d=1.27).
We also compared the help-seeking responses of students with varying relationship statuses. Students listed themselves as either single, dating someone, or married. There was no significant difference in help-seeking between dating and married students. There was a significant difference, however, between help-seeking among single students and dating (p=.002) or married (p=.000) students. Single students were slightly more likely to report help-seeking behaviors, but the difference was very small (effect size=.012). Students also reported how long they had been involved in their current relationship (if applicable); this only predicted help-seeking between the extremes (less than one month vs. more than one year). However, these data do suggest that single students are more likely to say that they would receive help if they were being abused and that the longer a person is involved in a particular relationship, the less likely it is that they will seek help if abuse happens. This makes sense in light of the fact that people often stay in abusive relationships while their single friends criticize them for doing so.
We examined several characteristics of relationship styles for any association with help-seeking. Of four attachment styles, only fearful attachment had any predictive power (p=.017); students higher in fearful attachment were more likely to report abuse. This effect only explained 6.3% of the variance. Relationship functions, i.e. students’ reasons for wanting to be in a relationship, were too skewed to yield useful results. For each relationship function (social connection, certainty/meaning, self-verification, self-expansion) except for status/superiority, most students rated each as very important, skewing the data too far to get an accurate reading of how each relationship function would affect help-seeking. Rejection sensitivity, a separate category, was fit to be used as a predictive factor but yielded no significance for help-seeking.
Finally, students who were more depressed, as measured by the Short Depression Scale, were less likely to report help-seeking behaviors (p=.007). This is also not a surprising finding in light of past research on help-seeking.
Unfortunately, many of the measures used in the original study were too high in face validity, too low in internal consistency, and/or too skewed to facilitate effective prediction of help-seeking behavior. Those that did not have these problems yielded no significance or ambiguous results, except for gender and depression, which provided nothing that was new or groundbreaking in this field. This makes our secondary analysis disappointing, to be sure, but it also raises questions about the validity of conclusions derived from the original study.