Adherence Analysis of Couples with Violence Completing Marital Therapy

Objectives: This study was intended to study the predictive factors of adherence to and completion of marital therapy of couples with intimate partner violence. Methods: The participants in this study were 70 couples with husband-initiated aggression against their wives, and who attended a study evaluating the effectiveness of ordinary psychiatric treatment. We analyzed variables such as social status, clinical factors, intimate partner violence, and marital power, to identify the predictive factors of adherence to marital therapy, and the cause-and-effect relation between those variables. Results: The result of the survival analysis showed that wife with higher income (p ＜ 0.05), later age of onset for intimate partner violence, lower frequency of mild violence, and husband with more affection predicted the adherence of couples to marital therapy (p ＜ 0.001). Structural equation modeling further revealed that a husband with more years of education had direct positive effects on a couple's adherence to marital therapy, husband's age had indirect positive effects, and high frequency of mild violence had direct negative effects on the couples' completing marital therapy. In short, husbands who were younger in age, with frequent mild violence, and with lower academic achievement had difficulty adhering to marital therapy. Conclusion: The results of this study can increase our understanding of intimate partner violence, provide intervention strategies for family domestic violence prevention and augment the quality of services.