Page 86 - Contributed Paper Session (CPS) - Volume 6

CPS1829 Lana Clara Chikhungu et al.
1. Introduction
The most recent Malawi Demographic and Health Survey report estimates
that 42% of ever-married women have experienced some form of physical,
sexual or emotional violence perpetrated by their current or most recent
spouse(NSO-Malawi & DHS-Program, 2017). A number of studies have
investigated intimate partner violence in Malawi within the context of
HIV/AIDS and girls sexual abuse and a few have studied the role of socio-
cultural factors in influencing gender based violence(Mellish, Settergren, &
Sapuwa, 2015). No study has considered multiple ways in which abuse is
perpetrated, nor attempted to analyse the patterns of abuse holistically. Using
cluster analysis and multinomial logistic regression, this study identifies the
distribution of different forms of abuse amongst married women in Malawi
and the key attributes associated with each form of abuse.

2. Methods
The data are drawn from the 2015 Malawi Demographic and Health Survey
(2015 MDHS) carried out under the DHS programme. The woman’s
questionnaire collected information from 24,562 women out of 25,146 women
aged 15 to 49 years that were eligible for the interview representing a 98%
response rate. One third of the sampled households received domestic
violence questions (6,379 household). Further details of study design and data
collection are reported on the National Statistical Office of Malawi website:
http://www.nsomalawi.mw/.
Explanatory Variables
The choice of explanatory variables is guided by findings from previous
literature and data availability. These comprised of demographic variables:
age of the woman, age of the woman at first sex, age at first cohabitation,
geographic/location variables: urban/rural residence, region, religion, ethnicity
and socio-economic variables: household wealth status, whether husband
takes alcohol or not, woman’s education level, whether the woman is currently
working or not and type of marriage (polygamous or monogamous)).
Statistical Analysis
Cluster analysis is used to extract meaningful groupings of the experience
of domestic violence from the MDHS. 18 binary variables are used in forming
clusters, each taking the form of a 0/1 indicator variable where the variable
takes the value 1 if the woman reports experiencing that form of domestic
abuse and zero otherwise. We include three domains of domestic abuse:
physical (formed using reports of the woman being: pushed, slapped,
punched, kicked, strangled, threatened with a weapon, limb twisted), sexual
(physically forced into sex, coerced into sex, forced to perform a sex act) and
controlling behaviour (husband exhibits jealous behaviour, accused of being
unfaithful, needs permission to see friends, needs permission to see family,

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