Abstract
The Cyber Dating Violence Instrument for Teens (CyDAV-T), originally conceptualized in Spanish as the Escala de Violencia Online en Parejas Adolescentes (Sánchez-Jiménez et al., 2023), is a psychometrically validated self-report instrument engineered to assess both perpetration and victimization of cyber dating violence among adolescents. Spurred by the ubiquity of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in youth romantic dynamics, the instrument addresses the pressing need for a dual-perspective, multidimensional measure capable of capturing modern manifestations of digital relationship abuse. The development process originated with a comprehensive 34-item operationalization rooted in literature reviews and adolescent focus groups, which was initially reduced to 28 items via expert qualitative analysis. Subsequent psychometric evaluation was conducted on a normative sample of secondary high school students (aged 14–18 years) in southern Spain who had engaged in a romantic relationship within the preceding twelve months.
Through the integration of modern Item Response Theory (IRT) parameters and classical test theory, the instrument was systematically refined to 19 items across two parallel structures: the Aggression Scale and the Victimization Scale. Both structural forms are underpinned by a congruent three-factor latent architecture: Verbal/Emotional Violence, Control, and Sexual Violence. Items are rated on a 5-point Likert-type scale reflecting behavioral frequency over the preceding year (ranging from 0 = ‘This has never happened to me’ to 4 = ‘This almost always happens to me’). Confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated outstanding model fit for both the aggression model (χ²(149) = 163.81, CFI = .99, RMSEA = 0.02) and the victimization model (χ²(149) = 227.71, CFI = .98, RMSEA = 0.04). Internal consistency, estimated via McDonald’s omega (ω), ranged from .69 to .79 for aggression dimensions and .72 to .85 for victimization dimensions. Criterion and convergent validity were corroborated through robust correlations with online moral disengagement and non-consensual sharing of intimate imagery. The CyDAV-T constitutes an ecologically sound, structurally invariant metric for adolescent clinical assessment, school psychology, and empirical research on digital aggression.
Keywords
Adolescence, Aggression, Control, Couples, Cyber Dating Violence, Romantic Relationships, Sexual Violence, Verbal/Emotional Violence, Victimization, Psychometrics, Item Response Theory, Online Dating Abuse
Authors
The Cyber Dating Violence Instrument for Teens (CyDAV-T) was developed and validated through an international research collaboration between scholars at the Universidad de Sevilla (Spain) and the Università degli Studi di Firenze (Italy):
- Virginia Sánchez-Jiménez — Departamento de Psicología Evolutiva y de la Educación, Universidad de Sevilla, Seville, Spain. (ORCID: 0000-0001-7394-9311; Correspondence: [email protected])
- María-Luisa Rodríguez-deArriba — Departamento de Psicología Evolutiva y de la Educación, Universidad de Sevilla, Seville, Spain.
- Federica Stefanelli — Department of Education, Languages, Intercultures, Literatures and Psychology, Università degli Studi di Firenze, Florence, Italy.
- Annalaura Nocentini — Department of Education, Languages, Intercultures, Literatures and Psychology, Università degli Studi di Firenze, Florence, Italy.
Purpose
The fundamental purpose of the CyDAV-T is to provide a psychometrically rigorous, developmentally sensitive, and structurally symmetrical measurement tool designed to quantify cyber dating aggression and victimization in adolescent couples. Over the past two decades, the interpersonal ecology of adolescent courtship has migrated heavily onto digital communication platforms, social networking sites, and instant messaging services. While these channels offer novel pathways for intimacy and relational bonding, they concurrently afford pervasive, round-the-clock avenues for intrusive monitoring, coercive control, emotional mistreatment, and sexual exploitation.
Prior instruments targeting adolescent relationship violence frequently adapted face-to-face abuse batteries without properly reflecting the nuances of technological affordances, or they suffered from psychometric shortcomings such as conflating minor jealousies with systemic digital stalking, ignoring sexual cyber violence, or generating asymmetric scales wherein victimization and perpetration items lacked structural parallelism. The CyDAV-T addresses these measurement gaps through several explicit objectives:
- Dual-Perspective Relational Measurement: The tool assesses both aggressive behaviors executed against a romantic partner (perpetration) and abusive behaviors suffered from a partner (victimization) across identical behavioral scenarios. This allows investigators to analyze dyadic dynamics, mutual aggression patterns, and unique typologies of pure victims, pure aggressors, and bully-victims in cyberspace.
- Multidimensional Deconstruction: The CyDAV-T explicitly separates digital romantic abuse into three empirically validated dimensions: verbal/emotional violence, digital monitoring/control, and non-consensual sexual pressure/dissemination.
- Psychometric Precision via Modern Test Theory: By employing Item Response Theory (IRT) alongside traditional Factor Analysis, the authors sought to identify and eliminate items with poor discriminatory capacity or extreme floor effects, producing an optimized 19-item version that maintains high precision without burdening adolescent respondents.
- Clinical and Psychoeducational Application: The tool serves as an essential screening metric for secondary school counseling offices, community mental health clinics, and adolescent violence prevention programs. It assists practitioners in identifying subtle, normalized forms of digital control before they escalate into offline intimate partner violence (IPV).
Psychological Construct
The CyDAV-T conceptualizes Cyber Dating Violence (CDV) as an intentional, repetitive, or ongoing pattern of hostile, coercive, or non-consensual behaviors enacted via electronic media, mobile applications, or telecommunication platforms against a current or former romantic partner. The construct is grounded in a symmetrical dual-axis paradigm (Aggression vs. Victimization) segmented across three distinct psychological and behavioral dimensions:
1. Cyber Verbal/Emotional Violence
This subscale captures digital behaviors intended to humiliate, insult, threaten, isolate, or psychologically undermine a romantic partner. In adolescent relationships, electronic communication often exacerbates emotional volatility due to the absence of paralinguistic cues and the hyper-immediate nature of messaging apps. Specific behavioral exemplars include sending hostile or demeaning text messages, issuing threats to terminate the relationship or cause physical harm via digital channels, maliciously excluding a partner from digital peer circles, posting public status updates designed to insult the partner’s dignity, or intentionally sharing humiliating digital content on social media feeds to provoke reputational damage.
2. Cyber Control and Surveillance
The control dimension reflects digital behaviors aimed at restricting personal autonomy, monitoring spatial and social whereabouts, and enforcing romantic possessiveness. This dimension represents the most prevalent form of cyber dating abuse among youth, frequently misinterpreted by adolescents as normative expressions of love, care, or romantic devotion. Manifestations include demanding passwords or access codes to social networking accounts, continuous digital check-ins requiring immediate answers, tracking physical location using GPS-enabled features or mobile applications, scrutinizing contact lists and online interactions, and commanding a partner to delete specific friends or cease communications with certain peers.
3. Cyber Sexual Violence
This dimension operationalizes non-consensual, sexually coercive digital interactions. Adolescents frequently navigate the exchange of intimate self-generated imagery (sexting), which can transition into severe victimizing scenarios when coupled with power imbalances. The CyDAV-T captures behaviors such as pressuring or coercing a partner to transmit sexually explicit photographs, videos, or messages; threatening to publicly leak or distribute private erotic content if romantic demands are not met; and the actual unauthorized dissemination or forwarding of non-consensual intimate media to third parties or public forums (image-based sexual abuse).
Theoretical Framework
The development of the CyDAV-T is theoretically rooted in the convergence of several developmental and psychological frameworks:
Social Cognitive Theory and Online Moral Disengagement
Drawing from Albert Bandura‘s Social Cognitive Theory, digital dating aggression is mediated by self-regulatory and moral control mechanisms. In electronic environments, visual anonymity, asynchronous communication, and physical distance diminish immediate feedback from victims (such as facial expressions of distress or crying). This sensory detachment triggers moral disengagement mechanisms, including euphemistic labeling, displacement of responsibility, minimizing injurious consequences, and attribution of blame to the partner. Consequently, adolescents who endorse higher moral disengagement can perpetrate digital control or emotional abuse without experiencing acute moral distress.
The Social Ecological Model
In accordance with Bronfenbrenner’s ecological perspective, adolescent dating interactions are nested within individual, microsystemic (peer and romantic dyads), exosystemic (digital platforms, online norms), and macrosystemic (gender socialization, romantic myths) structures. The CyDAV-T’s inclusion of control behaviors specifically measures how pervasive cultural scripts regarding romantic jealousy and possession infiltrate the digital microsystem, shaping adolescents’ perceptions of normative partner accountability.
Routine Activity Theory in Cyberspace
Adapted to virtual interactions, Routine Activity Theory posits that digital victimization occurs when motivated offenders and suitable targets converge in an online environment lacking capable guardianship. The ubiquitous availability of smartphones transforms romantic relationships into persistent, unbounded interactions where adolescent targets remain perpetually accessible to coercive partners, removing temporal and physical protective barriers.
Validity
The psychometric validation of the CyDAV-T involved rigorous structural, convergent, and criterion-related analyses on secondary high school cohorts in Seville and Córdoba (Spain):
Construct and Structural Validity
Content validity was initially guaranteed through qualitative focus groups conducted with adolescents and subsequent expert panel reviews, which winnowed the initial 34-item candidate pool to 28 items. Psychometric validation eliminated non-representative items (items 23, 26, and 27) that exhibited negligible base-rate occurrence across the adolescent sample. Next, Item Response Theory (IRT) analyses (detailed in Section 9) eliminated further psychometrically unproductive items, resulting in a robust 19-item structure. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) substantiated that the three-factor model provided an exceptional fit to the data, with goodness-of-fit indices comfortably exceeding standard psychometric thresholds (CFI ≥ .98; RMSEA ≤ .04).
Convergent and Criterion Validity
Convergent validity was examined by assessing relationships between CyDAV-T subscales and established correlates of digital abuse:
- Online Moral Disengagement: Mean comparison analyses demonstrated that adolescents classified as active in cyber dating aggression and victimization exhibited significantly elevated levels of online moral disengagement compared to non-involved counterparts. Moral disengagement mechanisms correlated directly with verbal/emotional perpetration and sexual coercion.
- Non-Consensual Sharing Scale (NCS): To validate the sexual violence subscale, the authors examined associations with the Non-Consensual Sharing Scale (Walker et al., 2021). Significant differences were identified across groups: adolescents engaging in or suffering cyber dating sexual aggression showed systematically higher scores on the NCS scale. In almost all examined cross-tabulations, contrasts were statistically significant, with only control aggression and sexual victimization approaching, but marginally missing, the standard significance cut-off.
Reliability
The reliability of the CyDAV-T was evaluated using modern composite reliability estimators. Because psychological measures of aggression and deviant behaviors typically produce non-normal, positively skewed response distributions, the authors computed McDonald’s omega (ω) rather than relying solely on Cronbach’s alpha, which assumes tau-equivalence and normal item distributions.
Aggression Scale Reliability
Across the 19-item perpetration framework, McDonald’s omega values across the three latent factors demonstrated adequate to good internal consistency:
- Verbal/Emotional Violence: ω coefficients fell within the .69 to .79 range.
- Control: ω coefficients demonstrated robust internal consistency within the .70 to .78 range.
- Sexual Violence: ω coefficients demonstrated satisfactory reliability, reaching values up to .79.
Victimization Scale Reliability
The victimization framework demonstrated even higher internal consistency estimates across dimensions:
- Verbal/Emotional Victimization: ω ranged from .72 to .85.
- Control Victimization: ω ranged from .75 to .84.
- Sexual Victimization: ω ranged from .74 to .85.
These coefficients reflect strong composite reliability, indicating that the CyDAV-T items consistently measure their intended constructs without excessive item redundancy or measurement error.
Factor Analysis
The structural refinement of the CyDAV-T was executed through a complementary two-step psychometric methodology combining Item Response Theory (IRT) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA):
Item Response Theory (IRT) Analysis
Prior to finalizing the structural equations, the researchers evaluated the Item Characteristic Curves (ICC) under IRT paradigms to evaluate the discriminatory capacity and difficulty parameters across both aggression and victimization items. This analysis revealed that certain behavioral indicators had an exceptionally low probability of positive endorsement across the adolescent cohort (less than 0.1 probability, such as items 3 and 5 on the aggression scale). To preserve complete structural symmetry across the dual scales, any item displaying unacceptable endorsement characteristics or poor discrimination on either scale was systematically excised from both the aggression and victimization versions. This rigorous pruning winnowed the instrument from 28 down to 19 parallel items.
Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) Fit Indices
CFA was subsequently executed on the remaining 19 items using robust estimation methods suitable for ordinal data. A three-factor latent structure (Verbal/Emotional, Control, Sexual) was fitted independently to the Aggression and Victimization matrices:
- Aggression Scale (19 Items):
- Chi-Square: χ²(149) = 163.81
- Comparative Fit Index (CFI): .99
- Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): 0.02 (90% Confidence Interval: 0.00 – 0.03)
These metrics indicate an outstanding, well-fitting structural representation of digital aggressive behavior.
- Victimization Scale (19 Items):
- Chi-Square: χ²(149) = 227.71
- Comparative Fit Index (CFI): .98
- Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): 0.04 (90% Confidence Interval: 0.03 – 0.05)
These results confirmed that the 19-item victimization model exhibits remarkable parsimony and structural validity, matching the latent architecture of the aggression battery.
Instrument / Measurement Tool
- Instrument Name: Cyber Dating Violence Instrument for Teens (CyDAV-T) / Escala de Violencia Online en Parejas Adolescentes
- Test Type: Dual-form self-report rating scale (Perpetration/Aggression and Victimization)
- Target Population: Adolescents and emerging young adults (Aged 13–18+ years; validated specifically on high school students aged 14–18) who have engaged in a romantic relationship within the past 12 months
- Number of Items: 19 parallel items for the Aggression Scale, and 19 parallel items for the Victimization Scale (38 total item assessments across both forms)
- Dimensions / Subscales (per form):
- Cyber Verbal/Emotional Violence
- Cyber Control
- Cyber Sexual Violence
- Administration Modality: Electronic (computer-assisted web interviewing) or Paper-and-Pencil self-administration; individual or group classroom administration
- Administration Time: Approximately 10 to 15 minutes
- Authentic Response Scale: Items are rated on a 5-point Likert-type scale measuring behavioral frequency over the preceding year:
- 0 = This has never happened to me
- 1 = This has happened to me rarely / once or twice
- 2 = This happens to me sometimes
- 3 = This happens to me frequently
- 4 = This almost always happens to me
- Scoring and Interpretation: Dimension scores are calculated by summing or averaging item responses within each subscale (yielding scores from 0 to 4). Higher scores denote elevated frequency of perpetrating or suffering cyber dating violence. Cut-off typologies can categorize participants into: Non-involved, Pure Victims, Pure Aggressors, and Bully-Victims.
Permissions & Fee and Test Year
- Test Year: 2023
- Copyright: © 2023 Virginia Sánchez-Jiménez, María-Luisa Rodríguez-deArriba, Federica Stefanelli, and Annalaura Nocentini. Published in Psicothema under open-access research provisions.
- Usage Fee: Free of charge for academic, research, and non-commercial psychoeducational purposes.
- Permissions and Access: Researchers and practitioners wishing to implement the full operational item battery or adapt it to other linguistic/cultural contexts should consult the original publication (Psicothema, 35(2), 189–201) or contact the corresponding author directly: Dr. Virginia Sánchez-Jiménez, Universidad de Sevilla, Email: [email protected].
References
- Bandura, A. (1991). Social cognitive theory of moral thought and action. In W. M. Kurtines & J. L. Gewirtz (Eds.), Handbook of moral behavior and development (Vol. 1, pp. 45–103). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
- Borrajo, E., Gámez-Guadix, M., Pereda, N., & Calvete, E. (2015). The development and validation of the Cyber Dating Abuse Questionnaire among young couples. Computers in Human Behavior, 48, 358–365. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.01.063
- Sánchez-Jiménez, V., Rodríguez-deArriba, M.-L., Stefanelli, F., & Nocentini, A. (2023). Cyber Dating Violence Instrument for Teens (CyDAV-T): Dimensional structure and relative item discrimination. Psicothema, 35(2), 189–201. https://doi.org/10.7334/psicothema2022.196
- Walker, K., Sleath, E., & Wheatcroft, J. M. (2021). The Non-Consensual Sharing of Intimate Images Scale: Development and psychometric properties. Computers in Human Behavior, 122, Article 106859. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2021.106859
- Zweig, J. M., Dank, M., Yahner, J., & Lachman, P. (2013). The rate of cyber dating abuse among teens and how it compares to in-person dating violence. Criminal Justice Review, 38(1), 106–127. https://doi.org/10.1177/0734016813478942
Items of the Scale
The official, full 19-item proprietary text for both the Aggression and Victimization scales of the Cyber Dating Violence Instrument for Teens (CyDAV-T) is copyrighted by the respective authors and published under institutional license in Psicothema (Sánchez-Jiménez et al., 2023). In accordance with test integrity guidelines, the exact proprietary phrasing is not published in full in the open public domain without explicit author authorization.
Response Format and Rating Instructions
Respondents are asked to consider their romantic relationship experiences during the past twelve months. Items are rated on a 5-point Likert-type scale ranging from 0 to 4:
- 0 = This has never happened to me
- 1 = This has happened to me rarely / once or twice
- 2 = This happens to me sometimes
- 3 = This happens to me frequently
- 4 = This almost always happens to me
Structural Composition and Item Clusters
The instrument is administered across two parallel symmetrical batteries, each containing 19 specific behavioral items measuring identical acts from the alternate perspectives of Perpetration (“I have done this to my partner…”) and Victimization (“My partner has done this to me…”):
1. Cyber Verbal/Emotional Violence Dimension (Items assessing psychological and reputational harm)
- Behaviors involving sending insulting, offensive, or derogatory electronic messages via social networks or messaging apps.
- Behaviors involving digital threats to terminate the relationship or cause emotional/physical harm.
- Behaviors involving publishing embarrassing, humiliating, or defamatory comments or media online to damage the partner’s peer standing.
- Behaviors involving deliberate digital exclusion, public blocking, or group ostracism during relationship conflicts.
2. Cyber Control and Surveillance Dimension (Items assessing autonomy restriction and digital monitoring)
- Behaviors demanding passwords, account credentials, or direct access to mobile devices and social networks.
- Behaviors continuously monitoring online connection times, “last seen” timestamps, and read receipts, demanding immediate responses.
- Behaviors tracking geographic location or requiring GPS location sharing to verify whereabouts.
- Behaviors inspecting friends lists, requiring the deletion of specific contacts, or policing interactions and “likes” on social media profiles.
3. Cyber Sexual Violence Dimension (Items assessing digital sexual pressure and image-based abuse)
- Behaviors pressuring, coercing, or manipulating a partner to send sexually explicit text messages, nude photos, or intimate videos.
- Behaviors threatening to share, publish, or expose private intimate photos or videos to coerce compliance.
- Behaviors involving the unauthorized distribution, sharing, or public dissemination of non-consensual intimate media to third parties.
To obtain the verbatim 19-item Spanish scale or request permissions for translation and empirical use, researchers should contact the corresponding author, Dr. Virginia Sánchez-Jiménez (Universidad de Sevilla).