Exploratory Factor Analysis: The Workplace Disruption Assessment (IPV-WDA)

Background and Purpose: A vast majority of survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) experience economic abuse including employment sabotage. Professionals that rely on cellphones for work communication, like nurses, are particularly vulnerable to employment sabotage via technology abuse during work hours. Thus, the current study describes validating a new instrument, the Intimate Partner Violence- Workplace Disruptions Assessment (IPV-WDA). The IPV-WDA focuses on employment sabotage, and specifically includes items relevant to the occurrence of technology-facilitated abuse among individuals in female-dominated professions. While previous research has used factor analysis for economic abuse scales, the current study aims to fill gaps in the literature by determining the factor structure of the IPV-WDA scale through Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA).

Methods: Using a sample of IPV survivors (N=312) employed in the nursing profession, complete data was utilized to examine experiences of abuser-initiated workplace disruptions, including those that took advantage of cell phones (e.g. excessive texting, harassment of coworkers, preventing educational advancement).

EFA is often the first step in scale development and was used for the current analysis. The data was assessed for univariate and multivariate normality using the Shapiro-Wilk normality test and z-kurtosis, respectively. Data was non-normally distributed and so principal axis factoring (PAF) was used as the extraction method. To test data suitability for analysis, Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin’s measure of sampling adequacy and Bartlet’s test of sphericity were generated for the correlation matrix. An overall measure of sampling adequacy of 0.98 and a p-value <.05 for the test of sphericity indicate that the data is acceptable to analyze. To assess the number of factors in our data we used Kaiser’s eigenvalue > 1 rule, Cattell’s Scree Test. An oblique rotation method was chosen for this analysis to generate correlations between factors.

Results: Results revealed a two-factor structure; one containing a variety of disruptions relevant to the nursing profession. Factor one includes general abuser-initiated workplace disruptions (both direct and indirect created by abusers) that could happen before, after, or during work hours. Factor one accounted for 63.5% of the variance in experiences of abuser-initiated workplace disruptions. Factor two consisted of cellphone-based disruption tactics. Factor two accounted for 9.0% of the variance in experiences of abuser-initiated workplace disruptions.

Conclusions and Implications: Findings indicate that not only are workplace disruptions critical to study in order to understand the means to perpetrate and effects of intimate partner violence, but that workplace and economic abuse are not monolithic experiences. We observed subcategories of abuser-initiated direct and indirect tactics and a separate factor of cellphone-facilitated disruption tactics, suggesting the need to cast a wide net for capturing the nuances of employment and economic abuse IPV. Implications for healthcare organizations is to implement disruption-preventative policies to avoid frequently endorsed responses from participants (e.g., Missed weeks of work, Didn’t want to return to shift from breaks, quitting, or resigning). Such policies should consider requiring management to confidentially assess the well-being of all nurses during regular supervision (particularly by asking about home safety) and/or establishing organization-wide paid-time-off programs that allow employees to address stressful/family situations.