5. Factors Influencing Stay/Leave Decisions of Female Victims of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) in China

This research is intended to explore why women who have been abused by their intimate partners would choose to stay in the relationship. We hypothesized that these women’s subjective perception of their ability to leave has been undermined by the abuse, compared with their actual ability to leave. To test this hypothesis, we recruited a total of 420 adult women who have been engaged in at least one intimate relationship. In the experiment, the participants completed a survey, answering to several scales either self-designed or adapted from established studies, which measure both their objective ability to leave in various dimensions (such as income, education level, children, and health condition, etc.) and their subjective perception of the above dimensions. Additionally, the survey measures the participants’ sense of control to investigate its potential mediating effect, i.e., the abuse decreases women’s subjective ability to leave by lowering their sense of control. We compared the objective ability to leave of women who have undergone intimate partner violence and their perception of such ability to better understand factors influencing the stay/leave decision, and we further investigated the difference between IPV victims and women who have no such experience to seek ways that could better support IPV victims to heal from their abusive relationships.