Complexities Involving the Role of Gender and Setting on Provoked Interpersonal Violence: Comparing Analytical Approaches on Couple-Level Data

Clark (2008) analyzed the role of provocation on dating partners’ level of aggression and found they were more aggressive in jealousy-provoking situations. Using the couple-level dataset collected by Clark, we examine the relationship of gender and setting on provoked interpersonal violence, and compare the accuracy of several analytical approaches on interpreting dyadic data. Results indicate some findings from Clark are extremely robust. For instance, consistent with previous findings, the significant role of provocation on aggression in a dating context is further supported in the current study (Bettencourt & Miller, 1996; Jacquin et al., 2006). Clark suggested gender symmetry in levels of aggression. However, results show a significant effect of gender, in that females were more passive aggressive than males. One implication of this study is that when analyzing dyadic data, a multi-level modeling (MLM) approach best represents the relationship between the outcome and predictors when compared to other analytical approaches