In addition, associations between wife abuse and sociodemographic factors were investigated to enable two theoretical/conceptual perspectives regarding abuse to be evaluated. These perspectives maintain that abuse is more common among families under stress and among more "private" families. The district-specific percentages of men who reported physically abusing their wives ranged from 18 percent to 45 percent, with 18-40 percent of the men in each district having had nonconsensual sex with their wives and 4-9 percent having physically forced their wives to have sex. The authors used logistic regression analyses to control for a variety of sociodemographic variables; they found positive associations between wife abuse and stress-related factors, including the husband having a low education level, the couple living in poverty, the husband being young when he first lived with his wife, and the couple having multiple children. There was no strong empirical support for the theory that wife abuse may be more common in more "private" families. 4 tables and 29 references