Spouse Abuse & Marital System Based on Enrich

This study examined spouse abuse from the ecological perspective using the data from a national sample of 20,951 couples that took the ENRICH couple inventory. ENRICH assessed three ecological areas –contextual and socio-cultural factors; individual traits and behaviors; and couple interaction processes. Using the ENRICH couple typology, devitalized couples had the highest level of abuse while vitalized couples had the lowest. Using ENRICH scales, abusive individuals/couples were identified with 84% of accuracy. Abusive individuals and couples showed significantly lower levels of relational functioning in all three ecological areas assessed by ENRICH. Clinical and research implications for using ENRICH are presented. Spouse abuse has received much attention by family researchers and clinicians perhaps due to its high prevalence rate in the United States. According to a national survey conducted in 1995, about one fourth of women and one tenth of men in the United States were estimated to be raped and /or physically assaulted by a current or former spouse, cohabiting partner, or date in their life time (Tjaden & Theoennes, 1998). It was also estimated that 1.3 % of women (approximately 1.5 million women) and 0.9% of men (about 834, 000 men) over the age of 19 in the U.S. were raped and /or physically assaulted by their intimate partner during 1995 (Tjaden & Theoennes, 1998). Women have a good reason to be concerned with spouse abuse as one third of all murdered females in the U.S. were killed by their current or former partners in 1998 (National Victim Assistance Academy, 2000). Most research on spouse abuse thus far can be categorized into three areas: the profiles of the abusers and their individual characteristics (Gortner, et al., 1997; Margolin, et al., 1998; Ragg, 1999); the profiles of the victims and their individual characteristics (Briere & Runtz, 1987; Campbell, 1991); and the intergenerational effects of spouse abuse on the abusers and the victims (Giles-Sims, Straus, & Sugarman, 1995; Langhinrichsen-Rohling, et al., 1995; Straus, 1994; Straus & Yodanis, 1996). These studies have mostly examined how individual spouses were affected by spouse abuse, but they revealed only limited information about how spouse abuse was related to the couples’ relational issues. Even when the dyad was used as a unit of analysis, the previous research on spouse abuse tended to focus on only a specific area of couples interaction patterns, including demand/withdraw by Bern, Jacobson, & Gottman, (1999) or responsibility attributional processes by Byrne & Arias, (1997). However, very little attention has been paid to how the presence of spouse abuse relates to overall couple functioning. While past studies have focused on the micro-interaction patterns, there is