This article reports on observations of dating violence trajectories from adolescence to adulthood; discussing longitudinal study results that reveal trends, characteristics, and contexts of teen dating abuse; and notes implications for intervention and prevention, and study limitations.
The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) funded the first project on teen dating violence in 2005 and has continued to support studies in this area, including longitudinal studies that allow for examining risk and protective factors, and patterns and consequences of teen dating violence that extend into adulthood. In 2011, NIJ provided funding for researchers to develop the National Survey on Teen Relationships and Intimate Violence (STRiV), the first comprehensive national household survey focused on teen dating violence using detailed measures of victimization and perpetration. STRiV was designed to collect data from parents/caregivers and youths, with six waves of data collection being conducted over seven years. Continued NIJ funding supported additional data collection over the subsequent five years (October 2015 - November 2020). These follow-up studies examined the development of relationship abuse from early adolescence to young adulthood and identified risk and protective factors that could be used to inform intervention efforts that consider gender and developmental and contextual characteristics, including neighborhood-level factors. This article examines the results of these studies.