Sociological Exposition of Husband's Violence against Wives: An Empirical Examination of Multi-Theoretical Perspective

Today, husbands’ violence against wives has become a pervasive problem which knows no cultural, social, and economic boundary. The presence of such a complication calls for conducting scientific research so that the causes may be identified and the best solutions are offered. The main objective of the present study is to look into the social factors influencing husbands’ violence against their wives in Tehran. To accomplish this, the survey method was utilized and the required data was collected through a questionnaire whose reliability was α = 0.91 and its validity was confirmed through construct validity procedure. The research population includes all the married women aged 15 – 45 living in Tehran. Totally, 400 women were selected on the basis of the multi-stage cluster sampling method. Patriarchy theory, social learning theory and resources theory were utilized as the theoretical frameworks to investigate husbands’ violence against wives. The independent variables of the analytical model explaining the dependent variable include social support resources, the wife’s acceptance of gender clichés, the wife’s power in the family structure, tolerance of violence, violence in the family of origin and the relative socioeconomic status of the couple. On the basis of the data analysis, among the six independent variables, the wife’s power in the family structure with an impact coefficient of β = -0.43 is the most important predictor of husbands’ violence against wives. Violence in the family of origin, tolerance of violence, social support resources, the wife’s acceptance of gender clichés, and the relative socioeconomic status of the couple are the other predictors of the dependent variable, respectively.