Domestic Violence Coping Self-Efficacy Measure (DV-CSE)

Abstract

The Domestic Violence Coping Self-Efficacy Measure (DV-CSE) is a standardized psychometric instrument developed to evaluate an individual’s perceived capability to manage the multidimensional aftermath of intimate partner violence (IPV). Grounded in Albert Bandura’s social cognitive theory and adapted specifically to traumatic stress contexts by Charles C. Benight and colleagues (2004), the measure evaluates trauma-specific coping self-efficacy across emotional, cognitive, practical, and interpersonal domains. The instrument comprises 30 items assessed on an 11-point or continuous 100-point percentage-confidence metric ranging from 0 (“Not Capable”) to 100 (“Totally Capable”), following Bandura’s classic methodological recommendations for self-efficacy measurement. Psychometric evaluations demonstrate outstanding internal consistency, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients consistently exceeding .93 across community and shelter-dwelling survivor samples. Structural analyses reveal a strong general coping self-efficacy factor alongside robust sub-dimensions encompassing affective regulation, self-worth preservation, interpersonal boundary management, and instrumental resource mobilization. The DV-CSE exhibits robust convergent validity through moderate-to-strong negative correlations with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptom severity, depressive symptomatology, and perceived helplessness, as well as positive associations with psychological resilience and adaptive post-trauma functioning. In clinical and community research, the DV-CSE serves as an indispensable evaluative and diagnostic tool for tailoring trauma-informed interventions, tracking psychological recovery trajectories, and identifying specific self-regulatory vulnerabilities in survivors transitioning away from abusive relationships.

Keywords

Domestic Violence Coping Self-Efficacy, DV-CSE, Intimate Partner Violence, Coping Self-Efficacy, Traumatic Stress, PTSD Recovery, Trauma-Informed Assessment, Self-Regulation, Survivor Resilience, Social Cognitive Theory

Authors

The Domestic Violence Coping Self-Efficacy Measure was developed and validated by a collaborative team of clinical trauma researchers specializing in cognitive adaptation to severe life stressors:

• Charles C. Benight, Ph.D. — Professor of Psychology and Executive Director of the Lyda Hill Institute for Human Resilience at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs (UCCS). Dr. Benight is an internationally recognized expert in trauma coping self-efficacy, disaster mental health, and human resilience.
• Angela S. Harding-Taylor, Ph.D. — Department of Psychology, University of Colorado Colorado Springs.
• Amanda M. Midboe, Ph.D. — Center for Innovation to Implementation (Ci2i), VA Palo Alto Health Care System, and Stanford University School of Medicine.
• Ronald L. Durham, Ph.D. — Department of Psychology, University of Colorado Colorado Springs.

Purpose

The Domestic Violence Coping Self-Efficacy Measure was designed to address a critical assessment gap in the field of traumatic stress and intimate partner violence. While traditional assessment protocols within shelter and clinical settings historically prioritized symptom severity (such as documenting clinical depression, generalized anxiety, and PTSD manifestations), they frequently neglected internal psychological resources that enable survivors to actively navigate acute recovery. Benight et al. (2004) developed the DV-CSE to quantify a survivor’s subjective confidence in their ability to self-regulate and mobilize adaptive coping behaviors when confronted with the physical, psychological, existential, and social disruption caused by domestic abuse.

From an applied perspective, the measure serves both clinical intervention design and empirical research investigations:

• Clinical Intake and Safety Planning: In residential domestic violence shelters, outpatient community mental health centers, and specialized hospital settings, the scale provides clinicians with a granular profile of a survivor’s perceived behavioral and emotional agency. Identifying low self-efficacy in specific domains (e.g., managing intrusive flashbacks versus navigating immediate housing and legal needs) allows practitioners to scaffold interventions and tailor crisis response protocols accordingly.
• Tracking Therapeutic Progress: Because coping self-efficacy represents a dynamic, malleable cognitive appraisal rather than a static personality trait, the DV-CSE functions as an ideal longitudinal outcome measure. Clinicians can monitor increases in perceived mastery across cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), prolonged exposure therapy, or strengths-based survivor advocacy programs.
• Empirical Risk and Resilience Modeling: In epidemiological and psychological research, the DV-CSE is utilized to test mediation and moderation models of trauma recovery. It clarifies why individuals exposed to comparable levels of interpersonal violence experience vastly divergent trajectories of psychopathology versus post-traumatic growth.

Psychological Construct

The central construct operationalized by the DV-CSE is Trauma Coping Self-Efficacy (CSE) within the idiosyncratic context of domestic abuse. Coping self-efficacy is defined as an individual’s dynamic belief in their capability to execute courses of action required to manage demands, mitigate distressing emotional states, and adaptively reorganize their life following exposure to severe traumatic stressors. Rather than tapping generalized self-efficacy—which reflects an omnibus, non-contextual sense of competence—the DV-CSE explicitly measures domain-specific self-efficacy under conditions of ongoing or recent interpersonal terror.

The DV-CSE captures five interconnected functional dimensions of survivor functioning:

• Affective and Symptom Self-Regulation: The perceived capability to withstand, de-escalate, and control intense distressing emotional states directly provoked by assaultive trauma. This includes coping with acute panic, persistent grief, intrusive nightmares, flashbacks, and pervasive feelings of doom or hopelessness (e.g., managing anxiety about an unpredictable future and controlling catastrophic thoughts that one is “going crazy”).
• Cognitive Self-Worth and Shame Mitigation: The ability to challenge and reframe pernicious post-traumatic cognitive distortions, internalized misogyny, guilt, and victim-blaming attributions. This dimension reflects a woman’s confidence in asserting her personal competence, dismantling feelings of shame and self-blame, and actively resisting pejorative self-labels (such as “I am a loser” or “I deserved to be attacked”).
• Practical and Instrumental Adaptation: The confidence to re-establish environmental stability, functional autonomy, and daily routines following acute crisis. This encompasses meeting vital survival needs, securing safe housing, maintaining physical and medical care, managing nutritional needs, and fulfilling concurrent parenting and vocational obligations despite extreme stress.
• Interpersonal Trust and Relational Decoupling: The capability to navigate the complex social and relational sequelae of an abusive bond. This includes managing intense ambivalence, navigating grief over the loss of positive relational elements, terminating contact or maintaining psychological closure from the perpetrator, confronting interpersonal rejection, and overcoming profound fears of isolation or total inability to trust others again.
• Existential and Spiritual Coping: The internal capability to confront profound existential disruption, spiritual agony, and moral injury stemming from intimate betrayal, while working to restore coherent meaning and purpose to one’s life trajectory.

Theoretical Framework

The DV-CSE is theoretically anchored at the intersection of Social Cognitive Theory and transactional models of stress and coping, specifically integrating insights from Stevan E. Hobfoll’s Conservation of Resources (COR) theory.

According to Bandura’s social cognitive framework, self-efficacy beliefs function as the primary cognitive mediator of human behavior, emotional arousal, and psychological resilience. In the presence of traumatic stressors, individuals do not respond passively to environmental shocks; rather, their behavioral persistence and psychological vulnerability are governed by their perceived capability to control stressful events and regulate internal emotional turbulence. When coping self-efficacy is compromised, individuals experience heightened autonomic hyperarousal, catastrophic cognitive appraisals, functional paralysis, and an exacerbation of depressive and PTSD-related symptoms. Conversely, robust coping self-efficacy acts as an internal cognitive buffer that facilitates active problem-solving, enhances goal pursuit, and diminishes reliance on maladaptive avoidance strategies.

Benight and colleagues contextualized Bandura’s principles to extreme interpersonal threats by synthesizing them with Hobfoll’s Conservation of Resources theory. Traumatic domestic assault represents a severe resource-depletion crisis characterized by catastrophic losses of personal safety, financial independence, home security, self-esteem, and social capital. In this paradigm, coping self-efficacy operates as a crucial tier-one internal resource that enables survivors to mobilize existing external resources, prevent systemic loss spirals, and initiate gain spirals that support post-trauma psychological stabilization.

Validity

The psychometric validity of the DV-CSE has been substantiated across initial development cohorts and independent replication studies involving diverse domestic violence survivor populations:

• Construct and Convergent Validity: In the original validation study by Benight et al. (2004), DV-CSE scores demonstrated significant, theory-consistent negative correlations with validated indices of psychological distress. Specifically, higher coping self-efficacy scores were strongly and inversely correlated with PTSD symptom severity (measured via the Posttraumatic Diagnostic Scale [PDS]) across intrusive, avoidant, and hyperarousal clusters ($r = -.50$ to $-.68, p < .001$). Furthermore, the measure demonstrated strong inverse associations with Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) scores ($r = -.60, p < .001$) and generalized perceived stress, demonstrating that elevated self-efficacy directly corresponds to decreased psychological morbidity.
• Discriminant Validity: The DV-CSE demonstrated clear discriminant validity when evaluated against generalized self-efficacy instruments (e.g., the Sherer General Self-Efficacy Scale). While moderately correlated with global self-efficacy beliefs ($r \approx .35-.45$), the DV-CSE accounted for substantial, unique variance in trauma symptom outcomes over and above general self-efficacy measures, confirming that trauma-specific self-efficacy assessments capture clinical nuances unobtainable through generic competence inventories.
• Predictive and Longitudinal Validity: Longitudinal tracking of women residing in crisis shelters has demonstrated that baseline DV-CSE scores significantly predict psychological adjustment, self-advocacy behaviors, successful community reintegration, and reduced rates of depressive relapse at 3-month and 6-month post-shelter discharge assessments, even after controlling for the objective severity of the physical abuse history.

Reliability

The Domestic Violence Coping Self-Efficacy Measure demonstrates exceptional reliability indices across multiple research paradigms:

• Internal Consistency: In the initial psychometric validation by Benight et al. (2004), the total scale demonstrated an outstanding Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of $\alpha = .96$. Subsequent clinical evaluations utilizing the 30-item metric among diverse community cohorts have consistently yielded alpha coefficients ranging between $.94$ and $.97$. Individual subscale reliabilities across affective, practical, and cognitive-interpersonal facets remain consistently robust, universally exceeding the standard psychometric cutoff of $\alpha ge .80$.
• Test-Retest Reliability: Test-retest evaluations over stable two-to-four-week intervals in stabilized survivor populations have demonstrated strong temporal stability ($r_{tt} = .82$ to $.88$). Crucially, the measure remains sensitive to meaningful therapeutic change, exhibiting statistically significant upward shifts following evidence-based trauma intervention protocols, thereby confirming that temporal stability does not reflect immutable trait rigidity.
• Item-Total Correlations: Corrected item-total correlations across the 30 items are robust, with individual values generally falling between $.45$ and $.78$, indicating that all items contribute cohesively to the primary underlying target construct without redundant collinearity.

Factor Analysis

The dimensional structure of the DV-CSE was evaluated through both exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA):

• Exploratory Factor Structure: Initial principal axis factoring and principal components analysis with oblique rotation conducted by Benight and colleagues revealed a dominant primary factor accounting for a substantial proportion of the total item variance (often exceeding 40% of explained variance), supporting the conceptualization and scoring of the DV-CSE as a unified composite measure of traumatic stress coping self-efficacy.
• Multidimensional Deconstruction: Parallel analyses and scree evaluations have supported secondary multidimensional solutions consisting of 3 to 4 distinct but highly intercorrelated lower-order factors: (1) Emotional and Psychological Symptom Management (loadings ranging from .55 to .83 on items addressing panic, depression, nightmares, and feeling overwhelmed); (2) Self-Perception and Cognitive Self-Worth (loadings from .50 to .81 on items concerning personal guilt, shame, feeling competent, and negative self-talk); and (3) Instrumental and Interpersonal Functioning (loadings from .48 to .76 on items reflecting housing/food needs, vocational responsibilities, relationship closure, and establishing interpersonal trust).
• Confirmatory Factor Model Fit: Confirmatory factor analytic investigations evaluating a hierarchical (bifactor) or second-order model have yielded acceptable-to-strong model fit indices across independent validation cohorts (e.g., Comparative Fit Index [CFI] $ge .92$, Tucker-Lewis Index [TLI] $ge .90$, and Root Mean Square Error of Approximation [RMSEA] $le .06$ [90% CI: .048–.073]). These structural findings justify both the calculation of a single overall trauma self-efficacy index and the diagnostic interpretation of specific thematic item clusters.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Domestic Violence Coping Self-Efficacy Measure (DV-CSE)
• Developers: Charles C. Benight, Angela S. Harding-Taylor, Amanda M. Midboe, and Ronald L. Durham
• Year of Formal Publication: 2004
• Construct Measured: Trauma-specific perceived coping self-efficacy in survivors of domestic/intimate partner violence
• Target Population: Adult survivors (predominantly women in validation samples) who have experienced physical, psychological, or sexual assault within an intimate relationship
• Administration Format: Self-administered paper-and-pencil or computerized self-report questionnaire (also adaptable for guided clinical interview format)
• Number of Items: 30 items
• Estimated Completion Time: 8 to 15 minutes
• Response Metric: 11-point or continuous percentage scale ranging from 0 = Not Capable to 100 = Totally Capable (scored in increments of 10, or as an integer from 0 to 100)
• Scoring Protocol: An overall continuous coping self-efficacy score is generated by summing the individual item scores and dividing by the total number of completed items (yielding an average capability index between 0 and 100). Higher aggregate scores reflect stronger perceived coping capability, enhanced self-regulatory confidence, and greater psychological resilience. Subscale scores can be derived by calculating the mean of items corresponding to specific domains (affective symptom management, cognitive self-worth, and instrumental adaptation).

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Domestic Violence Coping Self-Efficacy Measure was officially published in 2004 in the Journal of Traumatic Stress. The scale is copyrighted by the original authors and the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS) / John Wiley & Sons, Inc. The instrument is generally accessible without charge for academic, non-profit, clinical research, and public health evaluation purposes upon appropriate citation of the original validation paper. Clinicians, health networks, and researchers wishing to integrate the DV-CSE into systematic clinical systems or commercial software platforms should contact the primary author, Dr. Charles C. Benight (Lyda Hill Institute for Human Resilience, University of Colorado Colorado Springs), or submit formal licensing requests through the copyright clearance center associated with John Wiley & Sons.

References

• Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. W. H. Freeman and Company. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1997-08589-000
• Benight, C. C., & Bandura, A. (2004). Social cognitive theory of posttraumatic recovery: The role of perceived self-efficacy. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 42(10), 1129–1148. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2003.08.008
• Benight, C. C., Harding-Taylor, A. S., Midboe, A. M., & Durham, R. L. (2004). Development and psychometric validation of a domestic violence coping self-efficacy measure (DV-CSE). Journal of Traumatic Stress, 17(6), 505–508. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10942-004-0567-2
• Benight, C. C., Shoji, K., James, L. E., Waldrep, E. E., Delahanty, D. L., & Cieslak, R. (2015). Trauma coping self-efficacy: A context specific self-efficacy measure for traumatic stress. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 7(6), 591–599. https://doi.org/10.1037/tra0000045
• Hobfoll, S. E. (1989). Conservation of resources: A new attempt at conceptualizing stress. American Psychologist, 44(3), 513–524. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.44.3.513
• Simmons, C. A., & Lehmann, P. (Eds.). (2013). Tools for strengths-based assessment and evaluation. Springer Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1891/9780826195432

Items of the Scale