The prevalence, patterning and associations with depressive symptoms and self-rated health of emotional and economic intimate partner violence: a three-country population based study

BACKGROUND: Emotional and economic intimate partner violence (IPV) are common. There remain outstanding questions: 1) whether the patterning of emotional and economic IPV varies across contexts, and whether the current indicators adequately capture this variation; 2) whether simply binary or more complex modelling strategies are appropriate; 3) whether health impacts of emotional and economic IPV are sustained in population-based studies, across multiple settings. METHODS: Ever partnered women (18-49 years) in cross-sectional, population-based data from three countries, China, Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Sri Lanka, from the United Nations Multi-country Study on Men and Violence in Asia and the Pacific. We assessed lifetime experience of emotional IPV (5 items) and economic IPV (4 items), item uniqueness (ie, the extent to which a person only reported that item), and descriptive associations and multivariable regression between combinations of emotional and economic IPV and physical and/or sexual IPV, for depressive symptoms and generalized health. RESULTS: In all countries, lifetime emotional and economic IPV were common. By item, only one emotional IPV item (he hurt others of importance) had <3% of women uniquely identified by it. There was no item with low uniqueness for economic IPV. By item, and the entire scale, two or more experiences of emotional IPV, or economic IPV, were consistently associated with worse depression and generalized health. Emotional IPV was independently associated with higher depressive scores, and emotional IPV was independently associated with worse generalised health scores, across multiple models. Women experiencing physical and/or sexual IPV combined with emotional or economic IPV, reported the highest depressive symptoms and worst generalised health scores. CONCLUSIONS: Emotional IPV and economic IPV are more, or as, common as physical IPV and sexual IPV in three countries in Asia-Pacific. The current set of emotional and economic items captures a range of unique instances of IPV and that forms of emotional and economic IPV are patterned across different contexts. In addition, the use of a simple binary coding of these scales provides a robust way of providing a measure of health impact. The simplicity of this approach enables replication and standardization of measurement of these key constructs across multiple settings, enabling comparison.