Abstract

National and international studies have pointed out Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS, Straus, 1979, 1996) as one of the most widely used measures for assessing the strategies used in situations of conflict within young couples. Nevertheless, there is not any conclusive result about its structure. Especially the physical dating violence scale has undergone several structural analyses providing monofactorial and bifactorial structures. The aim of this study was focusing on the validation of structural models using confirmatory factorial analysis (CFA) of CTS within adolescent couples, considering the differences between boys and girls and between aggressors and victims. 3258 adolescents, aged 15-21, were selected using a stratified random sample and interviewed using an adaptation of the CTS questionnaire. The results pointed out that it is not possible to identify a single model fit, but boys and girls, aggressor and victims, have the same pattern: a bifactorial model which establishes different but correlated moderate aggressive behaviors and severe aggressive behaviors. These results are discussed in terms of the potential value of this two-factor structure for understanding the phenomenon.