Abstract
An increasing prevalence of domestic violence (DV), or more specifically intimate partner violence in this article, has become a serious threat to social sustainability because it is a challenge for policymakers to choose effective countermeasures under limited resources. Cost estimation provides a measure of evidence-informed policymaking that potentially improves transparency and accountability. However, the cost estimation of DV is methodologically understudied, especially in Japan. This scoping review focuses on medical costs of DV and reviews models for estimating the economic burden of the medical costs attributable to DV. To achieve this purpose, I referred to existing reports published by governments and public institutions abroad, such as the CDC and NIJ reports in the U.S., the report by National Statistics in the U.K., and the report by the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation. I found that there are three basic approaches to medical cost estimation used in these reports̶the bottom-up, proportion, and adjusted incremental cost approaches. The bottomup approach sums the costs per utilization or person. The proportion approach calculates the population attributable fraction (PAF) from the relative risk and applies the proportion to the total medical cost. The adjusted incremental cost approach statistically controls confounders to estimate net incremental costs of DV. I argue that the limitation of the current reports based on each approach is that they insufficiently describe the estimation methods and have technical flaws in the estimation models. Given the current limitations identified above, in this scoping review, I address the pros/cons and caveats in the use of each approach employed to estimate the medical cost of DV.
