Отбасылық зорлық-зомбылықты зерттеудегі қақтығыс тактикалары шкаласы

The conflict tactics scale (CTS), created by Murray A. Straus in 1979, is used in the research of family violence." There are two versions of the CTS; the CTS2 (an expanded and modified version of the original CTS) and the CTSPC (CTS Parent Child). As of 2005, the CTS has been used in about 600 peer reviewed scientific or scholarly papers, including longitudinal birth cohort studies. National surveys conducted in the USA include two National Family Violence Surveys (1975 and 1985), the National Violence Against Women Survey (1998), which, according to Straus, used a "feminist version" of the CTS in order to minimize data on female perpetration of intimate partner violence (IPV), and the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well Being. A major international survey to use the CTS was the 2006 International Dating Violence Study, which investigated IPV amongst 13,601 college students across thirty two different countries. In a 2005 article in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence, Jennifer Langhinrichsen Rohling listed the CTS amongst the most important advances in the field of IPV research, stating it "was revolutionary because it allowed researchers to quantitatively study events that had often been ignored culturally and typically took place in private." However, the CTS is one of the most widely criticized domestic violence measurement instruments due to its exclusion of context variables and motivational factors in understanding acts of violence. The National Institute of Justice cautions that the CTS may not be appropriate for IPV research "because it does not measure control, coercion, or the motives for conflict tactics."

The scales are based on the premise that conflict is an inevitable aspect of all human association, but that the use of coercion (including force and violence) as a conflict resolution tactic is harmful. The CTS focuses on "conflict tactics" – the method used to advance one's own interest within a conflict – as a behavior, and measures the conflict tactic behaviors of both the respondent and their partner/primary caregiver. However, the CTS "deliberately excludes attitudes, emotions, and cognitive appraisal of the behaviors" measured. This is because many victims of IPV do not see themselves as suffering abuse, and as such, their cognitive appraisal of their situation can affect the measurements of the CTS. Straus explains that the "discrepancy between the behavior and the cognitive appraisal of the behavior is important for understanding family violence and for designing programs of prevention and treatment. However, it is possible to identify the discrepancy only if there is an instrument such as the CTS which obtains the behavioral data." A CTS based study would ideally include data from respondents and their partners/primary caregivers in order to investigate the degree of symmetry or asymmetry between their responses. The CTS can be administered through an in person interview, telephone interview, self administered questionnaire, and/or computer administered questionnaire.

Critics of the CTS argue it is an ineffective tool with which to measure IPV rate because, although it counts the number of acts of violence, it does not provide information about the context in which such acts occur (including the initiation, intention, history, or pattern of violence). Critics say such contexts cannot be divorced from the act itself, and therefore the CTS misrepresents the characteristics of violence between partners. Straus responds to this criticism by stating "the idea that the CTS physical assault scale is defective because it does not take into account the context, meaning, causes, and consequences of the violent acts is analogous to declaring a reading ability test invalid because it does not provide data on why a child reads poorly (such as limited exposure to books at home or test anxiety), or for not measuring the harmful effects of reading difficulty (such as low self esteem or dropping out of school)." Michael Kimmel says of this argument, "such an analogy is utterly inadequate. It is more akin to a teacher who doesn't look at how far off the spelling mistakes are or whether there is a pattern in the mistakes that might point to a physiological problem like dyslexia or some other learning disability, as compared to academic laziness, and thus leaving the learning problems untouched and misdirecting funds away from towards punitive after school programs for lazy students." Another common criticism is that the CTS carries ideological assumptions about domestic violence, such as the notion that partner violence is the result of an "argument" rather than an attempt to control one's partner. Furthermore, the CTS asks about frequency only in the past twelve months and fails to detect ongoing systematic patterns of abuse. The CTS also does not measure economic abuse, manipulation involving children, isolation, or intimidation – all common measures of violence from a victim advocacy perspective. Another methodological problem is that interobserver reliability (the likelihood that the two members of the measured dyad respond similarly) is near zero for tested husband and wife couples. That is, the chances of a given couple reporting similar answers about events they both experienced is no greater than chance. On the most severe CTS items, husband wife agreement is actually below chance: "On the item "beat up," concordance was nil: although there were respondents of both sexes who claimed to have administered beatings and respondents of both sexes who claimed to have been on the receiving end, there was not a single couple in which one party claimed to have administered and the other to have received such a beating."