Validation study of Women Abuse Screening Tool and its use to screen frequency and pattern of women abuse in Pakistan

---

Faizan Fazal

Rawalpindi Medical University, Pakistan

: J Womens Health, Issues Care

Abstract

---

Introduction: Abuse against women is still a human rights issue in all countries around the globe even in this era of advancement. Objective: To validate Women Abuse Screening Tool and use to screen frequency and pattern of women abuse in Pakistan Methods: This is a validation study using cross-sectional survey design. The sample size was calculated to be 355. Inclusion criteria was being a woman, aged 18 or above, marital status not-single (married, divorced or widowed), able to read Urdu, having time and capacity to spare 20mins for the interview and scale filling. Results: About 56% of the study population was aged between 30 to 45 years, 28.7% was over 45 years and 15.4% were under 30 years old. The recommended cut-off of 13 or higher for detecting domestic violence was used to see how the translated version measures up to screening interview in terms of sensitivity and specificity. It showed a very high specificity of over 93% but the corresponding sensitivity was only 53.5% thus at this cut-off about half of the respondents may have been missed. Calculations were repeated by lowering the WAST cut-off to 11 and it yielded acceptable values in both sensitivity and specificity .The values of Cronbach alpha for 8-item scale and 6-item scale were 0.901 and 0.879 while that for first 2 items only was 0.658. Conclusion: WAST can be used in Pakistani setting for screening of women abuse in households and work places. WAST cut-off to 11 yielded acceptable values in both sensitivity and specificity. Pearson correlation showed better strength for use of WAST with cut-off value of 11. So we recommend use of WAST in Pakistan with a cut-off value of 11 for screening of abuse against women. Keywords: Validation , Women Abuse Screening Tool, women abuse.

Biography

---

Faizan Fazal is a 4th year medical student at Rawalpindi Medical University, Pakistan. He is pursuing an undergraduate degree in MBBS (Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery). Faizan is an avid, keen and active researcher. He holds a distinguished post of Student Trainee Editor at Student Supplement of Journal of Rawalpindi Medical College (SJRMC). He has published 8 papers up till now in reputed national and international journals and is currently working on a number of research projects in Pakistan including original studies, case reports, meta-analysis and randomized controlled trial.