Modeling Help Seeking Intentions In Victims Of Intimate Partner Violence: A Conceptual Replication Of Fleming And Resick (2017)

Victims of intimate partner violence come forward and seek services and help for the crimes committed upon them at much lower rates than victims of other interpersonal crimes. In this study, the Theory of Planned Behavior was used to assess individual behavioral predictors of formal help-seeking in victims of intimate partner violence in order to better understand factors that promote or inhibit help-seeking in this vulnerable population, including victims’ attitudes about help seeking, the subjective norms they feel about help seeking, their perceived ability to get help, and the relationship these factors have with prior experiences. Partial support was found for the full Theory of Planned Behavior model predicting intentions for all resource types, with attitudes and perceived behavioral control predicting intentions for most resources, while norms rarely contributed to the variance. Prior experience was related to attitudes about several of the resources.