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BACKGROUND: One of the key reasons for the high prevalence of intimate partner violence among women is the justification of intimate partner violence. Socio-economic status of women plays a key role in intimate partner violence justification. This study investigated the socio-economic inequalities in the justification of intimate partner violence among Ghanaian women. METHODS: Data from the 2014 Ghana Demographic and Health Survey were used in this study. The study involved a total of 9267 women. A binary logistic regression analysis was performed to examine the socio-economic disparities in intimate partner violence justification. The findings were presented as adjusted odds ratios (aORs) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs) demonstrating precision. Statistical significance was set at p85 low- and middle-income countries. This article was written in accordance with the Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology guidelines (Appendix 1). This study used the women’s file, which contains responses from women ages 15–49 y. The GDHS captures a wide range of information on sexual and domestic violence as well as maternal and child health. It is a nationwide survey, with a representative sample of 9396 women. However, the actual sample for this study was 9267 women who had complete data on all the variables of interest. The 2014 GDHS utilized a two-stage stratified sampling technique. The first stage was the thorough selection of clusters/enumeration areas in Ghana’s rural and urban districts. The second step was the selection of households within the enumeration areas chosen in the first stage. The Ghana Statistical Service, Ghana Health Service and ICF International17 questioned eligible women (permanent residents and those who joined the homes the night before the survey). The final report17 contains the detailed methodology of the 2014 GDHS. The study’s data are available at https://dhsprogram.com/data/dataset/Ghana_Standard-DHS_2014.cfm?flag=0. Justification of IPV was the outcome variable for the study. Participants were asked if they would justify IPV under five circumstances: going out without telling her husband/partner, neglecting the children, arguing with her husband, refusing to have sexual intercourse with the husband/partner and burning the food. For each of these circumstances, responses were ‘yes’, ‘no’ and ‘don’t know’. These were coded as no=0, yes=1 and don’t know=8. For the purpose of the analysis, only women who provided confirmatory responses (either yes or no) were included in the study. Following the methodology employed by Alam et al.11 and Seidu et al.,1 if a respondent was of the view that beating would be justified, she was assigned a score of 1, otherwise she was assigned a score of 0. All five circumstances were used to generate the binary outcome variable: 1 if the respondent was of the view that beatings were justified in any circumstance and 0 if the respondent thought beatings were not justified in any circumstance. SES was the key explanatory variable. The study used wealth quintile and maternal education as proxy measures of SES, similar to earlier studies.18,19 Wealth quintile was categorised into poorest, poorer, middle, richer and richest. Maternal education is a standardized variable that measures the highest degree of education gained and is divided into four categories: no education, primary, secondary and higher education. Age, place of residence, occupation, religion, parity, region, frequency of listening to radio, frequency of reading a newspaper and frequency of watching television were all controlled for in the study. Table 1 shows the coding for these variables. Earlier studies1,7,11,13 and their availability in the databases influenced the choice of the control variables. Sociodemographic characteristics and prevalence of justification of intimate partner violence (N=9267) p-Values are from χ2 test. Stata version 16.0 was used to analyse the data (StataCorp, College Station, TX, USA). Both descriptive and logistic regression analyses were employed. The study sample was described using descriptive statistics (frequency and percentages). The prevalence of IPV justification was computed based on their SES and other socio-demographic variables. Two binary logistic regression models were created. The first model (model 1) looked at SES and justifications of IPV, but the second model (model 2) controlled for the effects of all the independent variables as well as socio-economic variables. A multicollinearity test was performed using the variance inflation factor (VIF) and the results revealed no evidence of multicollinearity (mean 1.55, maximum 3.33, minimum 1.08). The results were provided as adjusted odds ratios (aORs) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs) indicating their precision. At p<0.05, statistical significance was declared. To account for the survey's complex sampling design, sample weight was applied and the survey command (svy) was also employed. The Institutional Review Board of ICF International and the Ghana Health Service's Ethical Review Committee both gave their approval.17 The study also received authorization from the DHS Program to utilize these data for research.
