Explaining Intimate Partner Violence: The Sociological Limitations of Victimization Studies

This paper examines whether differentiating among types of intimate partner violence enhances the explanatory capacity of extant empirical models.The analysis uses national-level Canadian data to evaluate an alternative approach to operationalizing intimate partner violence, drawing upon Black's (1990) and Johnson's (1995) theoretical work. The main argument suggests that current efforts to explain intimate partner violence with victimization studies are inadequate because they typically do not measure key sociological variables. The failure to assess the contexts within which different types of violence occur further hinders explanatory efforts.The paper concludes with recommendations for innovative theoretical and methodological strategies to address these limitations.