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Past Research and Scholarship

The Coping Window: A contextual understanding of the methods women use to cope with battering

This qualitative study involved interviewing women in battered women’s shelters in order to understand how these women cope with the battering-related stressors they face. You can read a summary of this study in the Counseling Research-Practice Blog, sponsored by the UNCG Department of Counseling and Educational Development: http://cedresearch-practice.blogspot.com/2010/10/research-summary-coping-window.html

Women’s Leadership Network for Safe, Healthy, and Meaningful Lives

The Women’s Leadership Network was an innovative community-based approach to domestic violence resistance. Its goal was to enhance the capacity of women to create domestic violence resistance strategies tailored to the unique cultural and social needs of their own communities. This approach to domestic violence prevention programming is grounded in the principles of community organizing, community-based participatory research, and best practices in family violence prevention programming.

The program was implemented in one lower income, African-American neighborhood in the southeastern United States. The qualitative process evaluation indicated that this approach can be successful, but it requires researchers to be patient, “hands-on,” and willing to modify their approach to meet the needs and interests of the community.

Program Overview: There were two levels of program activities:

1. Level One: The first level involved a leadership training program for a select group of residents. This program aimed to equip the participating residents (i.e., the Women’s Leadership Network members) with the knowledge, skills, and self-efficacy needed to develop, plan, implement, and evaluate domestic violence prevention programming within their neighborhood.
2. Level Two: The second level involved the Women’s Leadership Network members developing and implementing domestic violence prevention programming within their community. The specific format and content of this programming was determined by the network members during their completion of the leadership training program. This programming focused on:
1. increasing residents’ awareness of the problem of domestic violence
2. promoting social norms that favor healthy, nonviolent relationships
3. increasing residents’ knowledge of the resources available to help them with problems related to domestic violence
4. enhancing the relationships between community residents and local domestic violence-related services and institutions.

The full-text of the article on this program can be found here: http://endabuse.org/health/ejournal/2009/02/womens-leadership-network/.

Through the Eyes of a Survivor: Using Photovoice to help formerly battered women

When you look at a blank wall, what is the first thing that you think about? You may think that the wall is barren and needs pictures or that you do not like the color. This is not what one woman saw after being abused by her husband. For her, the blank wall holds memories, memories of food being thrown at the wall and at her. Memories of when her arm was broken because she did not "cook dinner right" for the 1000th time. To her that wall is just not a wall, but memories of her ex-husband and the abuse she suffered at his hands. Thus, the old adage that a "picture is worth 1,000 words" holds true for her.

In order to help women disrupt revictimization and move forward beyond domestic violence, Beth Haymore, a recent graduate from Public Health Education and former graduate assistant in CWHW implemented a study entitled Through the Eyes of a Survivor. The study used a concept known as photovoice, whereby people, in this case, formerly battered women, take photographs and write narratives about them. This process empowered them to define for themselves their experiences and find ways to explain it to others.

Collectively, the images and words have the potential to provide a powerful way for a community to learn about the tragedy of domestic violence, and hopefully, work for change. Through the Eyes of a Survivor was a 10-week program, which was implemented in partnership with a domestic violence agency in rural North Carolina. The participants met regularly in a safe place to share their photographs and narratives with each other.

The project served as Beth's Capstone experience for her Master's program. The program concluded with a focus group to examine the extent to which participants believed that Photovoice helped them to process their experiences and move beyond re-victimization and how it could be used as a tool for community action.

The following is a short video, which is a compilation of the participant's pictures.