Received, Perpetrated and Perceived Violence in Adolescent Partner Relationships (V.R.E.P): Instrument development and validation

Abstract

Dating violence during adolescence and with young people is highly two-way, increasingly frequent and the prelude or origin of adult dating violence. Because of the difficulty of the study, there are not many appropriate measures to evaluate dating violence in adolescents and some existing ones omit aspects such as the perception of violent behavior. Therefore, the study focuses on drawing up a questionnaire that measures violence that has been both received and imposed and how it is perceived in teen relationships. It has been created the questionnaire called VREP and it was designed, divided into: Physical, Sexual Psychological Humiliation-coercion, Jealousy-Control and Social. A first study with 286 young people analyzed the psychometric properties of the draft questionnaire. The final version consisted of 28 items. A second study with 695 young people analyzed the factorial structure, internal consistency, construct validity and convergent validity of the final version. The results have shown that this tool is suitable and, although brief, is psychometrically adequate to account for the construct of its basic dimensions.