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Intimate Partner Victimization and Depressive Symptoms: Approaching Causal Inference Using a Longitudinal Twin Design

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Abstract

Objectives

While a wealth of research reports a robust association between intimate partner victimization and depression, the relationship has not been tested using twin-based research designs to control for unmeasured genetic and shared environmental confounding.

Methods

Twin data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health are analyzed to test the causal hypothesis that intimate partner victimization increases depressive symptoms across the life course. A series of twin-based research methodologies are used to examine whether twin differences in intimate partner victimization during late adolescence are associated with differences in depressive symptoms in young adulthood.

Results

Males and females did not significantly differ in their prevalence or frequency of reported intimate partner victimization during late adolescence. Genetic and nonshared environmental effects were found to account for the covariance between intimate partner victimization and depressive symptoms. After controlling for common genetic effects, within-twin pair differences in intimate partner victimization were positively associated with within-twin pair differences in depressive symptomatology.

Conclusions

The results offer further support for the mental health consequences associated with intimate partner victimization and help strengthen causal inference arguments for the relationship between intimate partner victimization and depressive symptoms later in life.

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Notes

  1. Only respondents who reported being a victim of physical intimate partner violence were asked about sustaining an injury. If respondents did not report physical violence they were classified as a “legitimate skip” for the injury measure. Respondents with legitimate skips on this measure were given a value of “0”, since it indicated that they did not experience an injury or intimate partner victimization. Inspection of the data revealed that very few twins in the analytic sample had legitimate skips at Wave III (n = 8, .085% of total sample) and Wave IV (n = 5, .053% of total sample).

  2. Items were reverse coded when appropriate.

  3. The same pattern was observed when examining within-twin-pair correlations for the prevalence (instead of frequency) of intimate partner victimization at Wave III. Results are reported in Supplemental Table 1.

  4. Despite not finding evidence of sex differences in the prevalence or frequency of intimate partner victimization, there still remains the possibility of genetic and environmental sources of variance on intimate partner victimization varying by sex. Qualitative sex differences (i.e., sources of genetic and environmental variance that influence victimization are not the same between men and women) and quantitative sex differences (i.e., the magnitude of genetic and environmental effects on victimization vary across men and women) were tested using the decomposition of mean sex difference modeling approach proposed by Cho, Wood, & Heath (2009) and recently used by Richardson & Boutwell (2020). Evidence from this approach revealed that a minimally identified model with no constraints for sex differences provided the best fit to the data (χ2 = 475.18, p < .001, TLI = .98, RMSEA = .03), suggesting the absence of qualitative sex differences and R2 values for A, D, and E components were similar across men and women, indicating the absence of quantitative sex differences for intimate partner victimization.

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Acknowledgements

This research uses data from Add Health, a program project directed by Kathleen Mullan Harris and designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and funded by grant P01-HD31921 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. Special acknowledgment is due Ronald R. Rindfuss and Barbara Entwisle for assistance in the original design. Information on how to obtain the Add Health data files is available on the Add Health website (http://www.cpc.unc.edu/addhealth). No direct support was received from grant P01-HD31921 for this analysis

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  1. Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, College of Criminal Justice, Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, TX, 77340, USA

    Eric J. Connolly, Danielle L. Boisvert & Eric M. Cooke

  2. School of Criminal Justice, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, 45221, USA

    Brittany E. Hayes

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Connolly, E.J., Hayes, B.E., Boisvert, D.L. et al. Intimate Partner Victimization and Depressive Symptoms: Approaching Causal Inference Using a Longitudinal Twin Design. J Quant Criminol 38, 517–535 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-021-09509-6

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