Social Norms and Beliefs About Gender Based Violence Scale: A Measure for Use with Gender Based Violence Prevention Programs in Low-Resource and Humanitarian Settings

"Harmful social norms that sustain gender-based violence (GBV) include women’s sexual purity, protecting family honor over women’s safety, and men’s authority to discipline women and children."

Because programmes on primary prevention of GBV "seek to facilitate change by addressing the underlying causes and drivers of GBV at a population level", often through efforts to transform harmful social norms, these researchers used social norms theory as elaborated in social psychology to develop a "brief, valid, and reliable measure to examine change over time in harmful social norms and personal beliefs that maintain and tolerate sexual violence and other forms of GBV against women and girls in low resource and complex humanitarian settings."

The researchers sought to create a valid tool through formative research and psychometric testing of the Social Norms and Beliefs about Gender Based Violence (GBV) Scale. Testing of the Scale took place in Somalia and South Sudan in order to focus where GBV reporting systems "existed and could be accessed to generate data on case reports and referrals" and have partnerships in diverse service sectors for participants that disclose GBV and request referrals and for safe researcher access to sites through obtaining permission from national, regional, and district governmental authorities and ministries as well as traditional leaders in the communities.

In phase one, a focus group guide was developed and translated to the local language and in-depth training was given to local staff. The "guide focused on identification of social norms that protect women and girls from sexual violence and other forms of GBV, norms that are harmful (e.g., hide, sustain, or encourage), norms about disclosing and reporting sexual violence and other forms of GBV to authorities, and who are the people in the family or larger community that are influential in maintaining and changing social norms." Varies scenarios were given to the groups, and participants were asked about their beliefs and norms about how the family and community would respond to victims of the sexual assault or other forms of GBV, if the assault would be reported to authorities, and reasons for reporting or not reporting the assault.

A qualitative analysis identified themes of harmful and protective norms. In-country teams in a joint Somalia/South Sudan meeting shared the themes, rating their importance and offering wording refinements for context and cultural relevance. Eighteen items each in the domain of "personal belief" and the domain of "injunctive norm" were developed for testing - each with introductory statements and response scales. In phase two, sample testing was done. Psychometric analyses were done with resulting data.

After removing three items that proved too controversial or unrelated, the 15 items remaining formed three factors or subscales: "Response to Sexual Violence" included 5 items; "Protecting Family Honor" included 6 items, and "Husband’s Right to Use Violence" included 4 items. "These three factors represent social norms that are known from previous research to maintain the high rates of GBV in many global settings....", capturing the response of blaming the victim, identifying the stigma "associated with being a member of a family/clan where a women/girl experiences GBV and the importance placed on addressing the violence within the family/clan...", and reflecting social norms that support a husband's use of violence to discipline his wife and to have sex with her and illustrate his love for her.

"Validity of the injunctive norms subscales was supported by significant relationships with other variables (i.e., site and sex) as hypothesized during the development of the scale. The three sites were significantly different on the injunctive norms domain of the scale." The discussion suggests that interpreting the findings according to the differences in context, culture, and religion across the sites which inform social norms and personal beliefs is important. Also, due to its generalisability, the scale has the “potential to be used in not only humanitarian settings, but also GBV prevention programs in other low resource and fragile settings."

Recommendations include that researchers and practitioners "apply the Social Norms and Beliefs about GBV Scale in different humanitarian and global LMIC settings and collect parallel data on a range of GBV outcomes" allowing further validation of the scale "by triangulating its findings with GBV experiences and perpetration" and assessment "of its generalizability across diverse settings."