Abstract
Background
Accurate and reliable estimates of violence against women statistics form the backbone of monitoring efforts to eliminate these human right violations and public health concerns. Estimating the prevalence of intimate partner violence (IPV) is challenging due to variations in case definition and recall period, surveyed populations, partner definition, level of age disaggregation, and survey representativeness, among others. In this paper, we aim to develop a sound and flexible statistical modeling framework for global, regional, and national IPV statistics.
Methods
We modeled IPV within a Bayesian multilevel modeling framework, accounting for heterogeneity of age groups using age-standardization, and age patterns and time trends using splines functions. Survey comparability is achieved using adjustment factors which are estimated using exact matching and their uncertainty accounted for. Both in-sample and out-of-sample comparisons are used for model validation, including posterior predictive checks. Post-processing of models’ outputs is performed to aggregate estimates at different geographic levels and age groups.
Results
A total of 307 unique studies conducted between 2000-2018, from 154 countries/territories/areas, and totaling nearly 1.8 million unique women responses informed lifetime IPV. Past year IPV had similar number of studies (n=332), countries represented (n=159), and individual responses (n=1.8 million). Roughly half of IPV observations required some adjustments. Posterior predictive checks suggest good model fit to data and out-of-sample comparisons provided reassuring results with small median prediction errors and appropriate coverage of predictions’ intervals.
Conclusions
The proposed modeling framework can pool both national and sub-national surveys, account for heterogeneous age groups and age trends, accommodate different surveyed population, adjust for differences in survey instruments, and efficiently propagate uncertainty to model outputs. By describing this model to reproducible levels of details, the accurate interpretation and responsible use of estimates for global monitoring of violence against women elimination efforts are supported, as part of the Sustainable Development Goals.