Modelling the Evolution of Domestic Violence Occurrences in Portuguese Municipalities - What Causes Domestic Violence?

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Data Science and Advanced Analytics, specialization in Data ScienceThroughout the last years, domestic violence has been a widely discussed topic and an essential concern when building healthy communities. To fight the prevalence of this problem, its causes must be addressed. These causes can come from personal indicators, but they can also come from issues in society at large. It is important to shift the debate from micro-level to macro-level analyses, looking for structural factors in societies that contribute to the evolution of the number of domestic violence occurrences as these are the factors that can be addressed by regulatory bodies. When modeling domestic violence one can envisage two types of possible explanatory variables: risk factors and protective factors. The first ones, as the term suggests, increase the risk of domestic violence, causing a high number of occurrences when very prevalent. Protective factors do the opposite, buffing the risk for domestic violence. The identification of risk factors is very important for the prevention of violence and to guide policies. However, identifying protective factors is of the utmost importance as their presence in Societies can be promoted to avert the occurrences. The present document studies the evolution of domestic violence occurrences in the municipalities of the Portuguese mainland between 2009 and 2019 resorting to panel data analysis methods. The constant coefficients and the fixed effects approaches are employed to try and understand the relation between possible causes and domestic violence occurrences. While explaining a good proportion of the total variance encapsulated in the dependent variable was revealed to be a hard task, evidence of the importance of some variables in explaining domestic violence occurrences on a macro-level was found. These variables were the average number of children born to each woman in fertile age, the number of divorces per 100 marriages, the percentage of resident population with normal age for attending high school that is actually attending high school, the number of new marriages per 100 inhabitants, the percentage of men’s monthly gain that women receive on average, the number of people enrolled in employment and vocational training centers per 100 inhabitants and the number of doctors per 100 inhabitants according to the Doctors’ Professional Order. Most of these were shown to be risk factors, increasing the number of domestic violence occurrences