By David Finkelhor, UNH Professor of Sociology:
Murray Straus, an internationally influential former professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire and founder of the field of family violence research, died May 13, 2016 at the age of 89.
Beginning in the 1970s, his surveys established that people were far more likely to be assaulted and injured by members of their own family than they were by strangers, fundamentally changing popular and academic conceptions about crime and crime prevention.
He devoted much of his later career to the study of spanking and corporal punishment, accumulating evidence that spanking was associated with increased subsequent aggression among children and reduced warmth between them and their parents, among other negative side effects.
He pioneered techniques for getting information about sensitive topics such as being the victim or perpetrator of family violence in national household and telephone surveys. His Conflict Tactics Scale, which he revised over the years, became the standard approach for gathering information about child and spouse abuse and one of the more widely used instruments in social science.
His findings led him to the conclusion that, although women suffered more serious consequences than men from domestic aggression, women perpetrated a considerable amount of violence in intimate relationships that also needed to be addressed in public policy if families were to be made safe.
Early in his career he specialized in rural sociology and the measurement of family interaction.
Complete article
While Murray Straus was still living he made as much of his academic work as he could available free to the public. Regrettably after his passing UNH withdrew hosting services for students and faculty taking his material down. Since he was no longer alive to re-post it elsewhere I've retrieved a copy from the Way-Back Machine where you can still access it for now.
I went into efforts to control educational material more in my regular Blog in Zack Taylor: Copyright & "Intellectual Property" Are endangering Lives & Democracy! I had previously contacted him in the last few months of his life about an article about Stephen Pinker's citation of his work. I was unaware that he was in the last months of his life; however, he shared his work freely, sending me more files than he needed to to answer a minor inquiry, further implying that he wanted to distribute this to the public. If no one else is restoring his academic work to the internet where it can be found for free, as he previously wanted, I'll re-post it here. I don't promise to keep my own views out of this Blog, however I will keep them to a minimum and make it clear which are his articles, and which comments are mine.
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