Researchers at UTHealth Houston have been awarded a five-year, $3.3 million grant to extend a landmark study exploring the causes and effects of intimate partner violence.
The award will extend the Dating it Safe study from 15 to 20 years. The study is led by principal investigator Jeff Temple, PhD, associate dean for clinical research at UTHealth Houston School of Behavioral Health Sciences and professor and Betty and Rose Pfefferbaum Chair in Child Mass Trauma and Resilience at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston..
“Most of what we know about partner violence is limited to cross-sectional studies or very short-term longitudinal studies,” Temple said. “By expanding this study to 20 years, we can really determine how things that we do as adolescents will impact us as adults and as parents. Where that’s really important is we can start to look at things that protect us from ending up as abusive parents or parents with poor mental health or problematic substance use.”
The Dating it Safe study began in 2010 with a group of more than 1,000 high school students recruited from across southeast Texas. Researchers have conducted annual follow-ups with participants through 2025.
The additional funding will allow the team to follow up with participants through 2029, when they will be, on average, 34 years old. The 20-year timeframe will mark one of the most comprehensive datasets on intimate partner violence to ever be conducted.
Follow-up surveys with participants include information about mental health, sexual health, relationship satisfaction, criminal history, substance use, and coping mechanisms.
To date, the Dating it Safe dataset has resulted in 80 peer-reviewed publications by more than 100 unique authors, allowing researchers to identify predictors and consequences of intimate partner violence with the aim of developing and adapting school-, family-, and community-based interventions.
Among those interventions is the Fourth R program, which is designed to teach healthy relationship skills and reduce various forms of violence among adolescents. The program emphasizes that relationship knowledge and skills are as essential as reading, writing, and arithmetic.
About a third of women in the U.S. experience physical intimate partner violence by age 30. Mounting research has indicated that intimate partner violence has severe health consequences, including suicidality, substance use, and revictimization and perpetration of violence. Additionally, children exposed to intimate partner violence have a higher risk of developmental delays, school difficulty, and other health problems.
“By knowing what increases risk or mitigates risk of intimate partner violence, we can then design intervention and prevention programs for adolescents, young adults, and even for older adults that are based on data,” Temple said.
Other UTHealth Houston investigators on this study include Elizabeth Baumler, PhD; Leila Wood, PhD, MSSW; and Melissa Peskin, PhD.
The grant was awarded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, part of the National Institutes of Health.