Societal Index of Interpersonal Destructiveness: Attempting to Provide More Candid and Regular Reporting about Countries’ Interpersonal Violence Level on Global Perspective

Violence brings lots of misery to people’s lives all around the world. Unfortunately, difficulties to quantify the magnitude of violence worldwide and therefore to undertake global-level analysis or develop interventions, have occurred. According to Diprose (2007) absence of reliable and comparable country-level data collected at regular basis can be considered as a key problem. Attempting to provide more candid and regular reporting about countries’ interpersonal violence level on global perspective, a new social indicator - Societal index of Interpersonal Destructiveness (SIID) - is constructed by Nahkur et al. (published in Social Indicators Research in 2017) based on nationally representative subjective data of various sources (Integrated Database of World Values Survey and European Value Survey, WHO Online Mortality Database, World Bank Open Data, and the Standardized World Income Inequality Database), and national statistics of 89 societies around the world covering 25-year period from 1989 to 2014. Due to the problems with data availability and quality, indirect measurement approach is adopted in SIID—measuring the level of interpersonal destructiveness by factors that predispose or may be the result of destructiveness in interpersonal conflicts or relationships. Moreover, SIID offers new conceptual tool – interpersonal destructiveness of a society – to measure the level of interpersonal violence, aiming to grasp wider range of destructive strategies that individuals use in their interpersonal conflicts.

The paper reports SIID’s scores for 89 societies and 9 society groups for the period 2005 to 2014, and compares them with the results of other violence-related indicators. Compared to WHO (Garcia-Moreno et al. 2013) estimated prevalence of violence against women in intimate relationships, partly similar results emerged. The differences are discussed in more detail. Also, it is analyzed which factors are mainly determining the level of interpersonal destructiveness in different society groups.