Individual characteristics and family and neighborhood physical violence as predictors of cross-generational dating violence

Background/Purpose: Dating violence is a critical public health issue, affecting 1/3 of teens and 2/5 of adults.  While intimate partner violence research is growing, there is little data on dating violence across generations in the same family.  This presentation reports an analysis of individual, family, and neighborhood factors, including physical violence, predicting dating violence among adolescent and caregiver pairs in a rural sample.

Methods:  A survey gathered data on individual, family, and neighborhood characteristics in a sample of 287 teens and an adult caregiver.  Multinomial logistic regression modeled multilevel factors predicting dating violence among female adolescents only, female caregivers only, and female adolescent/caregiver pairs.

Results:  Teens were 12.9 and caregivers 39.6 years old on average, the majority racial/ethnic minorities. The caregiver was the mother in 90% of cases. The teen alone had been a victim of dating violence in 4.2% of cases, the caregiver alone in 42.5% of cases, and both the teen and the caregiver in 5.3% of cases. Among the factors predicting dating violence were parenting style, family violence, attitudes towards violence, depression, alcohol use, knowing someone who had experienced dating or family violence, neighborhood social characteristics, and the neighborhood-level rate of mental health hospitalizations.

Conclusions:  Rates of dating violence among teens and caregivers are consistent with national data.  Revealing is the extent to which teens and related adults both experienced dating violence.  The study differentiates individual, family, and neighborhood factors predictive of dating violence among teens and adult caregivers alone and among related teen and caregiver pairs.