Measuring coercive control from police reports of intimate partner violence

Coercive control is a pattern of behavior that often co-occurs with physical intimate partner violence (IPV) and some jurisdictions have criminalized this behavior. Research suggests that police can identify acts of coercive control but highlights disagreement on how to define and measure coercive control, which poses challenges to researchers gauging its influence on risk of physical IPV and to criminal justice practitioners responding to the offense. We tested inter-rater reliability in measures adapted from existing self-report coercive control assessments for documenting coercive control in police reports. In Study 1, two coders read three simulated police investigation reports and identified similar types of coercive control (67 %–100 % agreement) except for an “other” category (0 %). In Study 2, two coders demonstrated moderate agreement on the presence of coercive control categories (ICC = 0.56–0.59, 60 %–100 % agreement) in 20 brief fictional police reports, but disagreed on categorizing tactics that did not match the examples given. In Study 3, coders showed good agreement on the total number of coercive control items present in 20 real police reports (ICC = 0.78), and category-level agreement 60 %–100 %, using a 130-item checklist. Third-party identification of coercive control is possible; operationalizing coercive control through explicit behavioral examples improves coding reliability.