Violence and Victims 21(6) December 2006 : 691-706

This journal article reports on the development and initial validation of the Partner-Directed Insults Scale (PDIS), an instrument designed to measure the specific content of insults that men use against their intimate partners. A preliminary study involved a review of the relevant literature and utilised feedback from battered women to identify specific insults for inclusion in the PDIS. This was followed by a cross-national exploration in which two separate studies administered the PDIS to a sample of participants based in the United States (Study 1) and a sample of New Zealand participants (Study 2). The authors argue that their findings demonstrate the practical need for an instrument such as the PDIS and provide evidence for its discriminant validity by documenting that men's use of insults predicts their use of controlling behaviours and physical violence.