Beliefs about wife beating among medical students from Turkey

Muhammad M. Haj-Yahia*, Aynur Uysal

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

40 Scopus citations

Abstract

The paper presents a study conducted among 173 Turkish medical students, which examined their beliefs about wife beating through a self-administered questionnaire. An integrative conceptual framework was tested as the basis for explaining the students' beliefs. The results revealed that between 4.5 and 38.7% of the participants justified wife beating, between 3.5 and 5.3% of them tended to believe that battered women benefit from beating, and between 4.7 and 28.5% of them tended to believe that battered women are responsible for their beating. In addition, between 68.4 and 90.6% of the students expressed willingness to help battered women, and although nearly half of them perceived the violent husbands as responsible for their behavior, only about one-quarter of them supported punishing violent husbands. The results also indicate that significant amounts of the variance in students' beliefs about wife beating can be attributed to their patriarchal ideology toward family life and to their exposure to family violence during childhood and adolescence. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the results for future research, theory development, and training of medical students.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)119-133
Number of pages15
JournalJournal of Family Violence
Volume23
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 2008

Keywords

  • Battered women
  • Domestic violence
  • Integrative theory
  • Students from Turkey
  • Students of medicine
  • Wife beating

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