Assessment of the reliability of the conflict tactics scales - A meta-analytic review

This article reports meta-analyses of self-agreement and partners' agreemen t for physical aggression in relationships, measured by the Conflict Tactic s Scales. Evidence from concordance rates was inconclusive, and the limited correlational data indicated high interpartner agreement. Differences betw een self-reports and partners' reports for men and women were analyzed to a ddress the following hypotheses: Men but not women underreport their own ag gression, both sexes underreport their own aggression, and men underreport their victimization. In 18 studies of couples, mean weighted effect sizes s howed higher ratings of aggression from partners than from self-reports for both men and women. In 43 studies of unmatched men and women, the mean dif ferences were smaller than for couples but were greater for men than for wo men. Overall, this evidence indicated systematic underreporting in self-rep orts by both sexes (Hypothesis 2), which was greater for men among the larg er number of studies in which the men and the,women did not come from match ed couples (Hypothesis 1).