Journal of Community Medicine & Health Education
Open Access

Abstract

To clarify the relationship between the awareness of psychological violence committed by those in relationships with university students and students’ attitudes toward love. A self-administered questionnaire survey was distrusted among 232 students at University Z in Japan. The survey contents included their awareness regarding psychological violence from romantic partners (10 items) and their attitudes toward love (24 items). Toward love scale is composed of six subscales: Eros (passionate and aesthetic love), agape (altruistic love), mania (manic and obsessive love), storge (fraternal love), ludus (fun and playful love) and pragma (practical love). The relationship between awareness of psychological violence and attitudes toward love was examined using Fisher’s exact test. Of the 232 students, valid responses were obtained from 151 students, 90.1% were women and 9.9% were men, with a mean age of 20.3 years (SD 1.2). Regarding the relationship between the awareness of violence committed by romantic partners and attitudes toward love, those students in the Agape group were found to have significantly higher rates of ‘not violent’ responses than those in other attitude groups for two items: ‘He/she shouts loudly and swears at me’ (p=0.026); ‘He/she threatens me by thrusting a knife or other objects toward me’ (p=0.008). The Mania group was also found to have a significantly higher rate of a ‘not violent’ response for ‘He/she threatens me by thrusting a knife or other objects toward me’ (p=0.024) in comparison with other attitudes groups. The study findings clarified the relationships between attitudes toward love and awareness toward violence. It would be useful to carry out education programs firstly by providing students with opportunities to increase awareness of their own attitudes toward love and based on this understanding of their own attitudes, help them to increase awareness toward potential violence committed by romantic partners.

Biography

Mika Hasegawa is a Professor of Community Health Nursing at University of Fukui, Faculty of Medicine, School of Nursing. Her current focus is domestic violence and organizing participatory community health programs. Her recent research was on the effectiveness of domestic violence prevention education for university students. She is the Director of Victim’s Support Group in Fukui Prefecture. She is also involved in several community partnerships supporting domestic violence victims.