Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS)

Two general types of incidence surveys exist: the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS) and the Crime Victim Surveys (CVS). The former requires people to indicate what actions they have taken to resolve family conflicts; the latter requires people to indicate by what crimes they have been victimized. The CVS find the rates of reporting wife assault to the police comparable with the reporting rates for other assaults. However, these surveys have a filtering problem such that people who do not consider their abuse victimization to be a crime do not respond in the affirmative. Hence, incidence rates of reported spousal abuse, which are not defined as criminal by the victim, are low. To circumvent this filtering problem, Straus, Gelles, and Steinmetz devised the CTS, which asks ...