The purpose of this research endeavor was to test the appropriateness of a Contextual Family Therapy Theory in its explanation of intimate partner violence (IPV). Specifically, current literature and treatment models suggest that attachment theory and the Duluth approaches explain crucial components of IPV, but treatment efficacy for these programs reveals the need for a more comprehensive theory. This suggests that the field could be improved by conceptualizing IPV from a comprehensive, multi-dimensional approach. Thus, this endeavor sought to establish a relationship between IPV and the relational ethics construct using a Contextual Family Therapy theory framework. The Contextual approach would add to current treatment models through emphasizing a multi-dimensional, complex family systems explanation and treatment of IPV. The four dimensions of relational reality, outlined by Boszormenyi-Nagy in his development of Contextual theory, allow the importance of previously identified constructs associated with IPV perpetration. These approaches include feminist models that explain IPV through sexism and gender role theories and Attachment-based perspectives that focus on distance regulation. A secondary goal was to demonstrate the scope of Contextual theory by which attachment and feminism impact relational ethics in the explanation of IPV. The tertiary goal was to demonstrate interconnectedness between these constructs within couples using dyadic data analysis.
I utilized structural equation modeling (SEM) to simultaneously model these four facets (facts, individual psychology, patterns of systemic interaction, and relational ethics) including measures of sexism and adult attachment as indicators of individual psychology. Overall, results of SEM presented here highlight significant links between relationship ethics and IPV consistent with the Contextual theory conceptualization of IPV. In the model structure whereby relationship ethics fully mediated the relationship between individual psychology and the outcome variable IPV, significant relationships were found across the four dimensions of relational reality: between facts and individual psychology, individual psychology and relational ethics (attachment and relational ethics), and among relational ethics and IPV. In addition, the test of systemic interactions demonstrated that women’s relational ethics were negatively and significantly associated with their male partner’s perpetration of IPV. Surprisingly, measures of sexism were not significantly associated with either relational ethics or IPV in this sample. These results support the four-dimensional model outlined by Bosozrmenyi-Nagy in his description of relational reality and indicate that this model has the potential to add significantly to IPV conceptualization and intervention development.