For this survey, a “representative stratified probability sample of 12,300 women 18 years of age or over living in the ten provinces was interviewed by telephone between February and June 1993.” (Johnson, Sacco) This survey concentrates and focuses on violence and abuse conducted by the abuse or violence victims' partners in intimate relationships, such as the victims' present or former spouse or common law partner. The women, who were interviewed for this survey, were all questioned about their experience of nonfatal violence or abuse at the hands of their present or past husbands or common law partner.
In the article Lethal and Nonlethal Violence Against Wives, the authors briefly discuss, explain and describe Statistics Canada's homicide archive, which is also at times referred to or known as the “Homicide Survey.” This survey began in 1974 and went on until 1992. This survey is based on the victims' data files of all Canadian criminal homicides known to police, which are related to violence and abuse within intimate relationships. Every time new information and facts relating to this type of situation becomes available, the Homicide Survey is brought up and updated based on these new details. This survey, or archive, includes various different types of information involving sex, age, and marital status of the victim and the killer, as well as the relationship of both the killers and the victims.
There is also some mention and discussion of the Conflict Tactic Scale (CTS), which is a commonly used instrument in some quantitative researches, such as surveys. This instrument uses the "family conflict" approach and “consists of 18 items intended to measure ways of handling interpersonal conflict in family relationships.” (Johnson, Sacco) However, there are some surveys do, in fact, depart from this scale to come to their conclusion. One example of this type of departure is the 1993 Violence Against Women Survey.
Several other surveys discussed, mentioned and/or explained in the various different articles for this essay are the General Social Survey (GSS) on Victimization, the National Youth Survey, and the 1975 and 1985 National Family Violence Survey.
However, these surveys aren't as important or as reliable as the Violence Against Women and the Homicide Surveys. For instance, the GSS isn't very reliable or dependable, because it is a national survey, which was created “to monitor the attitudes and experiences of Canadians on a wide range of issues.” (Cohen, Maclean) It doesn't simply analyze abuse and violence, as well as other features involving this social problem. For this specific reason, to better understand and explain the issue of abuse and violence in Canada, the more general studies, such as the 2004 GSS on Victimization, is less dependable than the studies, which concentrate more on abuse and violence, such as the Violence Against Women Survey.
All of these studies and research methods have found information and data to help society better understand and explain abuse and violence in intimate relationships and reveal it as an important and severe social problem. The main finding in these researches is that women are more likely to fall victim to abuse and violence at the hands of their partners in intimate relationships than men are, though there still are some men who are victims of abuse and violence. Women are also considered and believed to be at greater risk of experiencing and encountering sexual assaults than men are.
It could be said that it may be for this reason that there are considerably less studies done on men, who are victim to abuse and violence at the hands of their intimate partner. In the article Canada's shelters for abused women, 2005/2006, the author explains and discusses that, “Differences in the type and impact of spousal violence experienced by men and women may contribute to differences men and women display in seeking help.” This fact may also partly explain and describe why there seem to be more studies done on the violence and abuse experienced by women than studies done on the violence and abuse experienced by men.
When this survey was done, in 1993, the Violence Against Women Survey was able to reveal new information about the subhect of violence and abuse in intimate relationships. The results of this survey showed that approximately “25% of all women had suffered physical or sexual assault (including threats of harm) at the hands of a current or past marital partner since the age of 16.” (Hart, Kropp, Roesch, Ogloff, Whittemore) This represents a total of 3075 women of the sample for this survey, who had experienced abuse by a current or past spouse.
The VAW survey was also able to come to the conclusion that approximately 51% of women in Canada had encountered and experienced no less than one event or incident of physical or sexual assault since they were 16 years of age. “This would represent over five million women.” (Johnson, Sacco) This survey discovered that the women in Canada, who are exposed to abuse and violence in intimate relationships, have higher rates of some form of physical illnesses than women, who aren't exposed to abuse or violence in their intimate relationships.
