Gender attitudes and intimate partner violence in Estonia in 2020: a differentiated experience based on gender

Details

Supervisors

Ester Lucia Rizzi

Faculty

Faculté des sciences économiques, sociales, politiques et de communication

Degree label

Master de spécialisation en méthodes quantitatives en sciences sociales

Abstract

Understanding intimate partner violence (IPV) is a challenge: it relies on complex social realities among couple – in this case, hetero couple only. While previous literature mostly considers economic and cultural patterns linked with IPV, this master thesis focuses on the interaction between IPV and gender attitudes (beliefs of what men and women ought to be as distinguished genders). Based on data from the Generations and Gender Survey II for Estonia in 2020, we want to understand to what extent traditional gender attitudes – as opposed to modern ones – are positively linked with the experience of IPV among men and women, along their socio- demographic situation. We initially assume that more traditional gender attitudes tend to significantly strengthen the experience of IPV – more strongly for women than for men – although their link might be diminished when confounded with other social aspects. We use t-tests and chi-square tests to see if there are meaningful differences between men and women in gender attitudes and experience of IPV. Then, we regress the experience of IPV by gender attitudes and see how strong their link is. Further regressions are made to distinguish the changes when accounting for the whole sample or only one gender, or when using added patterns as control or intermediary covariates. It appears that trends in IPV experience along gender attitudes remain solid and constant, even with other factors. Outputs are that a man with fully traditional gender attitudes is 25% roughly more likely to experience IPV than man with fully modern gender attitudes; and this gap is approximately 33% for women. On average, women are 1.9% more likely than men to experience IPV. Furthermore, the whole sample is quite balanced regarding gender attitudes, but men still tend to be more traditional and women a bit more modern.