
Kathryn M YountEmory University | EU · Hubert Dept. of Global Health
Kathryn M Yount
PhD, Social Demography, Founding Director of GROW
About
286
Publications
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Introduction
Asa Griggs Candler Chair of Global Health, Professor of Global Health & Sociology, and affiliate of Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies and Behavioral Sciences at Emory.
A world-class scholar of women's health, empowerment, and the prevention of gender-based violence, with more than 30 funded research projects around the world and author of more than 150 articles in the social sciences and public health. Founding Director of GROW, the Global Research for Women network to advance research for sustainable advances in women's lives. Recipient of the 2016 university-wide award for mentoring from the Emory Center for Women. Elected member of the Board of Directors of the Population Association of America (2018-2020).
Additional affiliations
June 2000 - October 2016
June 2000 - present
June 1992 - June 1993
Publications
Publications (286)
Background. Sexual misconduct is a global problem. Adolescents 15-19 years face the highest risk of
sexual misconduct, however, studies on school-based sexual misconduct in low and middle-income
countries (LMICs) are limited. We aimed to determine the prevalence of sexual misconduct, including sexual harassment, stalking, dating violence, and sexua...
Background
Globally, women 15–24 years are at heightened risk of sexual violence victimization, a risk factor for adverse mental, physical, and behavioral health outcomes. Sexual violence is common at universities and most often perpetrated by men, yet few evidence-based prevention strategies targeting men have been tested in low- and middle-income...
Background
One third of adult women report lifetime psychological intimate partner violence (IPV). Controlling behavior is a common dimension of psychological IPV; however, evidence is mixed on its cross-national and cross-time measurement invariance, limiting its use to monitor Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5.2.1, to eliminate all forms of vi...
Background
Globally, women 15–24 years are at heightened risk of sexual violence victimization, a risk factor for adverse mental, physical, and behavioral health outcomes. Sexual violence is common at universities and most often perpetrated by men, yet few evidence-based prevention strategies targeting men have been tested in low- and middle-income...
Rape myths—false but widely held beliefs that serve to deny and justify sexual aggression—present a major barrier to reporting and prevention of sexual violence in Vietnam and globally. Based on a parent study aimed at reducing sexual violence at two universities in Hanoi, we developed and assessed a contextualized measure of rape myths among young...
Growing access to technology and media has presented new avenues of influence on youth attitudes and norms regarding sexuality and sexual violence, as well as new technological pathways through which to perpetrate sexual violence. The aim of this research was to understand contextual influences on and needs for scale-up of sexual violence preventio...
Background: Women are under-represented in global health leadership worldwide. Socio- ecological barriers may diminish women’s institutional belonging, career aspirations, and leadership pathways. Aims: In this pilot study, we describe and evaluate EMERGE, Empowering Women for Leadership in Global Health, a theory-based, multicomponent leadership d...
This cross-sectional study is the first to describe the prevalence of violence and poly-victimisation among 310 female sex workers (FSWs) who were cisgender in Haiphong, Viet Nam. An adapted version of the WHO-Multi-Country Study on Violence against Women Survey Instrument was administered to assess physical, sexual, economic and emotional forms of...
Background. In lower-and middle-income countries (LMICs), studies of interventions to reduce intimate partner violence (IPV) perpetration are expanding, yet measurement equivalence of the IPV perpetration construct that is the primary outcome in these investigations has not been established. We assessed the measurement equivalence of physical and s...
Background
The necessary execution of non-pharmaceutical risk-mitigation (NPRM) strategies to reduce the transmission of COVID-19 has created an unprecedented natural experiment to ascertain whether pandemic-induced social-policy interventions may elevate collateral health risks. Here, we assess the effects on violence against women (VAW) of the du...
Objective: Attitudes justifying intimate partner violence against women (IPVAW) contribute to its persistence, and cross-national research on these attitudes can provide a window into the normative context of IPVAW and a key indicator to monitor global progress in preventing IPVAW. Monitoring cross-national attitudes about IPVAW requires psychometr...
The Economic Coercion Scale 36 (ECS-36) is a validated scale measuring women’s exposure to economic coercion for low-income countries. A valid short form is needed to facilitate parsimonious measurement of economic coercion in general surveys or program evaluations. We used data from a probability sample of 930 married women 15–49 years in Matlab,...
Depression, a major contributor to the global burden of disease, is an outcome of interest in clinical trials. Researchers and clinicians note that depression often presents differently across cultures, posing challenges in the accurate measurement of depressive symptoms across populations. A commonly used self-administered screening tool to measur...
Background
Gender-based violence (GBV) and violence against children (VAC) are two prevalent and highly interconnected global health challenges, yet data and research capacities to study these forms of violence and to generate evidence-based policies and programs remain limited. To address critical shortages in research capacity in Vietnam and to e...
Background: Empathy for rape victims is a correlate of sexual aggression and a target of interventions to reduce sexual violence on university campuses. Methods: We administered 17 adapted items from the Rape Empathy Scale to 793 first-year male undergraduates in Hanoi, Vietnam, in September 2020 and March-May 2020. Exploratory/confirmatory factor...
Background
Sexual violence by young men against women is common, but efficacious primary prevention interventions tailored to men are limited in low- and middle-income settings like Vietnam. GlobalConsent, a web-based sexual violence prevention intervention tailored to university men in Hanoi, is efficacious. Implementation research is needed to un...
Background:
The COVID-19 pandemic led to increase in mental health problems and substance misuse. Yet, little is known about its impact on rates of deaths of despair (death by suicide and drug overdose). Our objective was to determine the impact of COVID-19 stay-at-home orders on deaths of despair using population-level data. We hypothesized that...
Background: Girl child, early, and forced marriage (CEFM) persists in South Asia, with long-term effects on well-being. CARE's Tipping Point Initiative (TPI) sought to address the gender norms and inequalities underlying CEFM by engaging participant groups on programmatic topics and supporting community dialogue to build girls' agency, shift power...
Purpose: Discrimination has detrimental effects on mental health, particularly among Black, Indigenous, and people of color who are also sexual minority women (BIPOC SMW); however, measurement of multiple intersecting forms of discrimination (e.g., race, gender, and sexual identity discrimination among BIPOC SMW) poses methodological challenges. Th...
Background: The necessary execution of non-pharmaceutical risk-mitigation (NPRM) strategies to reduce the transmission of COVID-19 has created an unprecedented natural experiment to ascertain whether pandemic-induced social-policy interventions may elevate collateral health risks. Here, we assess the effects on violence against women (VAW) of the d...
Currently, Nepal is not on track to meet Sustainable Development Goal 5.3 – the elimination of harmful practices, including child, early and forced marriage by the year 2030. Evidence on what works to prevent child, early and forced marriage often is inattentive to contextual factors that influence intervention effectiveness. This study presents qu...
Sustainable Development Goal 5 challenges governments to address child marriage, which may inhibit girls from developing an agentic self. This paper assesses the direct influence of community gender norms on adolescent agency, and the normative contexts in which gender gaps in adolescent agency are larger or smaller in Nepal. Using baseline data fo...
According to recent data, in Nepal, 38.2% of women aged 20-24 years are married by the age of 18. This analysis of CARE's Tipping Point Initiative seeks to compare Nepali adolescent boys' and girls' perceptions of empirical and normative expectations around child, early and forced marriage. A baseline survey of 1,134 adolescent girls and 1,154 adol...
Background
Adolescence and emerging adulthood represent a period of heightened vulnerability to sexual violence (SV). While some research suggests that exposure to sexually explicit material (SEM) among adolescents and college students is associated with sexually violent behavior, our understanding of this relationship is limited. This study aimed...
Sexual violence remains a global problem that disproportionately affects women. Though sexual violence interventions exist, few have been implemented in low- or middle-income countries, and none in Vietnam for young men. We adapted a sexual violence prevention intervention (RealConsent) developed for college men in the U.S. and conducted a randomiz...
Globally, expanding women’s educational opportunities is promoted as an effective strategy for their empowerment. While women’s access to education in Bangladesh has increased in recent years, little is known about their participation in educational activities after marriage. Historically, local gender norms expect women to marry at an early age, p...
Time use, or how women and men allocate their time, is an important element of empowerment processes. To extend this area of study, this article proposes and explores the concept of time‐use agency, which shifts the focus from the amount of time individuals spend on activities to the strategic choices they make about how to allocate their time. It...
Sexual communication improves relationship quality and the sexual and reproductive health of both partners. Much of the research on sexual communication among adolescents has been conducted in settings of the Global North and focuses narrowly on sexual health and condom use. Building on prior measures of sexual communication, we developed a set of...
Background
The persistence and impacts of violence against women motivated Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5.2 to end such violence. Global psychometric assessment of cross-country, cross-time invariance of items measuring intimate partner violence (IPV) is needed to confirm their utility for comparing and monitoring national trends.
Methods
An...
In lower- and middle-income countries (LMICs), studies of interventions to reduce intimate partner violence (IPV) are expanding, yet measurement equivalence of the IPV construct—the primary outcome in these investigations—has not been established. We assessed the measurement equivalence of physical and sexual IPV item sets used in recent trials in...
Background
The persistence and impacts of violence against women motivated Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5.2 to end such violence. Global psychometric assessment of cross-country, cross-time invariance of items measuring intimate partner violence (IPV) is needed to confirm their utility for comparing and monitoring national trends.
Methods
An...
Social and economic changes in Vietnam since the economic restructuring of the 1980s have caused a shift in norms about premarital sex. While expectations of female chastity remain, sex before marriage is becoming more common among young people. As the formative phase of a parent randomized controlled trial, the present study examined the normative...
Background
Sexual violence against women remains a global public health problem, with Southeast Asia having among the highest rates of violence victimization globally. Exposure to violence in adolescence--a highly prevalent experience in Vietnam--is associated with later perpetration of violence against others. However, childhood maltreatment as a...
Abstract Background One third of women experience intimate partner violence (IPV) and potential sequelae. Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5.2—to eliminate violence against women, including IPV—compels states to monitor such violence. We conducted the first global measurement-invariance assessment of standardised item sets for IPV. Methods Demogr...
Sexual harassment (SH), defined as unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature, presents a global public health issue and a barrier to empowerment for women and girls. To understand the perceived causes of SH in the Jordanian university context, we conducted focus groups ( n = 6) and participatory data collection with students ( n = 317) and interviews wi...
Objective:
Bangladesh is historically a patriarchal society, but has made recent strides in increasing educational and economic opportunities for women. Yet men continue to perpetrate economic coercion and other forms of intimate partner violence against women in Bangladesh. This study examines how men in rural Bangladesh shape the economic activi...
Purpose
The COVID-19 pandemic and associated risk-mitigation strategies have altered the social contexts in which adolescents in low- and middle-income countries live. Little is known, however, about the impacts of the pandemic on displaced populations, and how those impacts differ by gender and life stage. We investigate the extent to which the pa...
BACKGROUND
Sexual violence against women occurs worldwide. Prevention programs that treat men as “allies” and integrate a bystander framework are emerging in lower-income settings but evidence of effectiveness is conflicting.
OBJECTIVE
We tested the impact of GlobalConsent on sexually violent behavior and prosocial bystander behavior among univers...
Background
Sexual violence against women is prevalent worldwide. Prevention programs that treat men as allies and integrate a bystander framework are emerging in lower income settings, but evidence of their effectiveness is conflicting.
Objective
This study aimed to test the impact of GlobalConsent on sexually violent behavior and prosocial bystan...
Sexual stigma has deleterious effects on the health and wellbeing of sexual minority women. In low- and middle-income countries, theories and research on stigma against sexual minority women largely focus on sexuality-related stigma processes, such as internalized homophobia or perceived or enacted stigma due to sexual identity, attraction or pract...
In this analysis, we assess whether laws that promote gender equity and freedom from violence are associated with a lower risk of prior-year physical and sexual intimate partner violence (IPV) among adolescent girls and adult women (AGW) and whether these laws protect more and less vulnerable AGW equally. We included all 15 countries that administe...
Economic coercion is a form of intimate partner violence (IPV) that is distinct from but often co-occurs with physical, psychological, and sexual IPV. Women’s experiences of economic coercion are understudied in low- and middle-income countries, despite increases in women’s economic opportunities in these settings. Bangladesh is a salient site to u...
Using Komter’s theory of hidden gender power in marriage, we explore how young Qatari women’s aspirations are influenced by their parents, future husbands, and the internalization of social norms about gender dynamics. Interviewing a convenience sample of 28 Qatari women, ages 18 to 25 years old and attending university in Qatar, we explore the way...
Despite the adverse effects of sexual harassment, measurement gaps persist. Using a sequential, mixed-methods approach, we adapted and validated the Sexual Experiences Questionnaire (SEQ) to measure sexual harassment victimization among college-going women in Jordan. From a 213-item pool and qualitative data from students at the study site, we remo...
Background
Bullying is an understudied global social problem. While school-level factors are a recognized influence on bullying victimization, the elements of a ‘girl-friendly’ school that may reduce the risk of bullying victimization among girls and prevent dropout is understudied in lower- and middle-income countries (LMICs). This study used base...
Background. One third of women experience IPV and potential sequelae. Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5.2, to eliminate all violence against women, including IPV, compels national governments to monitor such violence. We conducted the first global measurement-invariance assessment of standardized physical IPV items.
Methods. Thirty-six Demograph...
The Vietnamese government has made efforts to promote gender equality and to discourage intimate partner violence (IPV), yet IPV remains a common experience for married women in Vietnam. IPV leads to severe injury, poor mental health, chronic disease, and substance abuse among women, yet little is known about why men perpetrate IPV. We explored how...
Introduction
Girl child, early and forced marriage (CEFM) persists in South Asia, with long-term consequences for girls. CARE’s Tipping Point Initiative (TPI) addresses the causes of CEFM by challenging repressive gender norms and inequalities. The TPI engages different participant groups on programmatic topics and supports community dialogue to bu...
Sexual harassment (SH) is a form of gender-based violence (GBV) that negatively impacts women’s physical, mental, social, and financial well-being. Although SH is a global phenomenon, it also is a contextualized one, with local and institutional norms influencing the ways in which harassment behavior manifests. As more women attend institutions of...
Objective: Bisexual and other non-monosexual (bi+) women are at higher risk than monosexual women for mental health problems. While being in a relationship is typically associated with better health outcomes, research suggests an inverse association for bisexual women. Despite emerging evidence of differences in bisexual women’s experiences based o...
Social norms surrounding sex and relationships remain gendered among young people in Vietnam, with men maintaining a privileged role in heterosexual relationships. This analysis explored how university students in Vietnam perceived prevailing gender norms, and how these norms influenced men’s understanding of sexual consent in dating relationships....
Assessing progress toward Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5, to achieve gender equality and to empower women, requires monitoring trends in intimate partner violence (IPV). Current measures of IPV may miss women’s experiences of economic coercion, or interference with the acquisition, use, and maintenance of financial resources. This sequential,...
Objectives
The health and social effects of women’s microfinance participation remain debated.
Methods
Using propensity-score methods, we assessed effects of microfinance participation on novel measures of agency; intimate partner violence (IPV) exposure; and depressive symptoms in 930 wives in Matlab, Bangladesh interviewed 11/2018–01/2019.
Resu...
Collective agency refers to a group’s or network’s perceived ability to come together, establish common goals or shared interests, and take action to attain those goals/interests. Group-based interventions that intend to relocate power, information, and resources to community groups may, in turn, enhance the personal agency of group members as well...
The Vice Presidential debate on 7 October 2020 between Senator Kamala Harris and Vice President Mike Pence was historic. For the first time in U.S. history, the electorate heard a Black woman candidate running for the second-highest political office in the country. Based on an analysis of the debate transcript, we argue that the micro-dynamics of t...
[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2019.06.018.].
India and the United States – both large, diverse, and unequal democracies – have responded very differently to the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, in both cases, the poor have been disproportionately burdened. In India, a hurried and unplanned lockdown caused extreme distress among workers and poorer sections of society while social protections have been...
Background:
Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5 prioritizes women's empowerment and gender equality, alone and as drivers of other SDGs. Efforts to validate universal measures of women's empowerment have eclipsed efforts to develop refined measures in local contexts and lifecycle stages. Measures of women's empowerment across the reproductive lif...
Background:
Sexual violence-any sexual act committed against a person without freely given consent-disproportionately affects women. Women's first experiences of sexual violence often occur in adolescence. In Asia and the Pacific, 14% of sexually experienced adolescent girls report forced sexual debut. Early prevention with men that integrates a b...