Are respondents who omit conflict tactics scale items more violent than those who omit none? A methodological note

In a study of 31,801 active-duty Army military men and women, the authors e ncountered protocols in which moderate or severe Conflict Tactics Scale (CT S) items had been omitted Dropping respondents who omit items could introdu ce biases into the data. We investigated the hypothesis that those responde nts who omitted an item differed in aggression from those who omitted none and hence should not be dropped from the analysis without further considera tion. We tested this by means of three comparisons of those who omitted one item and those who omitted none: classification of respondents into no agg ression, moderate aggression, and severe aggression; differences between me an CTS scores; and comparison of one-time aggressors with those who reporte d more than one incident in a year. All three methods indicated that the gr oup that omitted one item was more aggressive than the group that omitted n one.