Measuring adolescent dating violence: Development of 'conflict in adolescent dating relationships inventory' short form

Given the high prevalence of dating violence among adolescent and the significant consequences associated with adolescent dating violence, including its co-occurrence with other problematic behaviors such as alcohol and substance abuse, standardized measures to assess adolescent dating violence are essential. The objective of the present studies was to develop and validate a 10-item short form of the Conflict in Adolescent Dating Relationships Inventory (CADRI; Wolfe et al., 2001), a 46-item self-report questionnaire of dating violence among youth dating partners. In study one, the short form (CADRI-S) was derived from a sample of 277 high school students, and its psychometric properties were analyzed. In study two, the CADRI-S was validated on a sample of 365 at-risk youth involved with child protective services (CPS). The new short form was composed of two items for each subscale (physical abuse, threatening behavior, sexual abuse, relational abuse, and verbal/emotional abuse). Results showed acceptable reliability indices and confirmatory factor analyses revealed a good model fit. Indicators of convergent, concurrent and predictive validity are also provided. Although the sensitivity of the new short form was lower than that of the full scale, findings provided initial evidence of the validity of the CADRI-S and its potential applications are discussed. Future studies should evaluate its psychometric properties using an independent administration of the short and full form to the same participants.