Violence Against Women

Violence Against Women http://vaw.sagepub.com/

Guest Editor's Introduction: Part I: Methodological Advances in Recruitment and Assessment Rebecca Campbell Violence Against Women 2011 17: 159 DOI: 10.1177/1077801210397699 The online version of this article can be found at: http://vaw.sagepub.com/content/17/2/159

Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com

Additional services and information for Violence Against Women can be found at: Email Alerts: http://vaw.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://vaw.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://vaw.sagepub.com/content/17/2/159.refs.html

Downloaded from vaw.sagepub.com at MICHIGAN STATE UNIV LIBRARIES on March 2, 2011

VAW39769 9 VAW17210.1177/1077801210397699CampbellViolence Against Women

Guest Editor’s Introduction: Part I: Methodological Advances in Recruitment and Assessment

Violence Against Women 17(2) 159–162 © The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: http://www. sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1077801210397699 http://vaw.sagepub.com

Since the emergence of academic scholarship on violence against women in the 1970s, this multidisciplinary field has grown tremendously in its theoretical and methodological sophistication. However, as is often the case in science, and life more generally, our dreams are sometimes grander than our reality, our eyes bigger than our stomachs, and our theories have grown a bit bigger and messier than our methods have been able keep pace. It is one thing to say violence against women is a multifaceted, multilevel social problem rooted in multinational histories of oppression and colonization and quite another to operationalize that statement—by either quantitative or qualitative standards. Indeed, the National Research Council’s (1996, 2004) reviews of violence against women research documented a pressing need for increased methodological complexity and rigor in the field. This “methods gap” has been documented in other systematic analyses of violence against women studies and research agendas (Jordan, 2009; Koss & White, 2008). This is not to say that the field has not made significant advances in the development of effective strategies for sampling, data collection, and analysis, just that congruence of conceptual and analytic complexity has been difficult to achieve. Violence against women is an intractable social problem, and researching gendered violence requires methodological ingenuity to do and do well. Methodological innovation has always been a necessity in this field. Traditional social science methods have had to be tweaked, at the very least; reconceptualized, more typically; and sometimes completely tossed out in the quest to answer common quandaries in our field. How do we identify and recruit survivors of violence? What are the best methods for collecting data about victimization? How do we analyze data, whether quantitative or qualitative, in ways that reflect the lived experiences of survivors? How do we capture community impact and social change? Violence against women researchers have continuously developed solutions to these challenges and others. However, in the written discourse of our field, emphasis is nearly always on the substantive findings of a project, not the methodological creativity that took place behind the scenes to generate that knowledge. The purpose of this two-part special issue is to foreground methodology by highlighting current advances in research design and analysis across multiple methodological paradigms. The idea for this project stemmed from discussions at the University of Kentucky’s Corresponding Author: Rebecca Campbell, Department of Psychology, Michigan State University, 127 C Psychology Building, East Lansing, MI 48824-1116 Email: [email protected]


160

Violence Against Women 17(2)

Center for Research on Violence Against Women’s 2009 national meeting, “Advancing the Study of Violence Against Women: Is It a Science?” Consistent with Jordan’s (2009) call for the creation of a new science on violence against women, researchers and practitioners across multiple substantive domains emphasized that translational research methods are essential to the advancement of research and intervention for victims of violence. The articles in Parts I and II of this special issue showcase methodological innovations across varied forms of gender violence, sometimes introducing something completely new or rarely used in violence against women research, or changing existing techniques. It is also worth remembering that the word innovation has at its roots the inklings of revolution and rebellion—a challenge of old by new (Oxford English Dictionary Online, 2010). In that spirit, these articles also challenge the traditional format of academic writing in that they are a blend of instructional material, case examples, and personal narratives of some often hard-won lessons from practice. The articles are not intended to provide in-depth technical details of specific designs or analytic strategies but rather to showcase their applications for the advancement of violence against women research. This two-part special issue includes cutting-edge quantitative, qualitative, and mixedmethods designs, but the manuscripts are purposely not organized by their methodological paradigm. If nothing else was learned from the paradigm wars of the 1980s and 1990s, it was that rigid boundaries did little for encouraging the kind of pluralistic perspectives necessary for the advancement of science (Tashakkori & Teddlie, 2010). Therefore, the articles have been organized around four cross-cutting methodological issues that can be examined from multiple paradigmatic lenses: recruitment; assessment; analyses (longitudinal applications); and analyses (interventions/social program evaluation applications). In Part I, we start at the beginning with the age-old challenge of recruiting participants for research. Though some violence against women scholarship can use college student samples, the task of recruiting community-based participants is often daunting. The articles in this section reconceptualize this stage of research not as one of “getting in and getting access,” but one of learning the context and culture of our research participants and gaining their trust. Methods of recruitment must be tailored to the specific needs of diverse participants and the circumstances of their lives, and sometimes that means developing strategies that are outside the box or buck tradition. For example, Jill Messing and her colleagues partnered with law enforcement agencies to create a recruitment protocol whereby police officers were asked to recruit intimate partner violence victims at the scene of domestic violence incidents. Theirs is a story not only of a successful recruitment method but also of a process for building successful partnerships and bridging divides between researchers and community practitioners. Developing trust is often difficult across racial and ethnic divides, and Courtney Ahrens, Libier Isas, and Monica Viveros examine how participatory action methods were instrumental in recruiting Latinas for qualitative focus group research. The concept of confianza, mutually supportive relationships developed over time or through affinity networks, was of utmost importance to the Latino communities with whom they worked. As such, traditional community-based recruitment methods had to be redesigned to be congruent with this critical principle. The utility of tinkering with tradition is also evident in Sarah Ullman’s reflections on developing a longitudinal recruitment and retention


161

Campbell

protocol. Longitudinal research requires gaining participants’ trust not just once, but many times and this article highlights how modifying conventional tracking methods can help facilitate participants’ rapport, confidentiality, and trust. Also in this first issue, we examine current controversies and methodological developments for assessing the prevalence, incidence, and meaning of victimization. One of the most enduring challenges in this field has been identifying the best methods for accurate and valid measurement of the prevalence and incidence of various forms of violence against women. Sarah Cook, Christine Gidycz, Mary Koss, and Megan Murphy review the history and current methodological debates in the assessment of rape victimization. The early limitations of national surveys such as the National Crime Victimization Survey have been well documented and led to the emergence of behaviorally specific assessment methods. However, whether to ask about victimization events in a direct or indirect manner is at issue, and this article explores the methodological intricacies of trying to capture sexually assaultive acts, tactics, and expressions of nonconsent. Christopher Krebs and colleagues conducted an empirical study comparing and contrasting these direct and indirect assessment methods, which found no statistically significant differences in the rates obtained by each method. Their findings by no means end this debate, and Krebs and colleagues examine the relative advantages and disadvantages of each method. Maria Testa, Jennifer Livingston, and Carol VanZile-Tamsen took a different approach for wrestling with the validity of direct assessment methods in sexual victimization research. In a mixed-methods project, they collected both quantitative and qualitative data regarding women’s experiences of sexual assault. Their studies highlight the power of triangulating methods as their findings showed that quantitative surveys like the Sexual Experiences Survey (SES) directly mapped onto women’s narrative accounts of victimization. Turning to research on intimate partner violence, the foibles of self-report data have generated similarly sustained debates. Getting at the crux of self-report accuracy, Tami Sullivan, Enna Khondkaryan, Nancy Dos Santos, and Erica Peters conducted a safety and feasibility assessment of using experience sampling methods (ESM) with victims of domestic violence. Participants were randomly assigned to complete daily telephone data collection, daily paper diaries, or monthly retrospective semistructured interview methods. Their findings suggest that ESM is a promising method for safely assessing the daily dynamics of victimization. Transcending the issue of whether self-report data are “accurate” is a more fundamental question of what victimization means to women. Floretta Boonzaier and Samantha van Schalkwyk used narrative qualitative methods to examine how low-income South African women define physical, psychological, and sexual intimate partner violence by their frames of meaning. Boonzaier and van Schalkwyk show how narrative methodology is particularly well suited for examining the role of complex sociocultural factors, such as gender, race, ethnicity, and poverty, in intimate partner violence research. By way of preview, Part II of this special issue will focus on innovations in analytic techniques. A set of articles will highlight advances in quantitative longitudinal methods, including life history calendar methods combined with multilevel modeling and growth curve modeling. Another set of articles will explore design and analytic developments in the evaluation of community interventions and systems change initiatives, including case


162

Violence Against Women 17(2)

examples of randomized control designs, multilevel modeling, cost-effectiveness methods, and geographic information systems techniques. Stay tuned . . . Rebecca Campbell Guest Editor

References Jordan, C. E. (2009). Advancing the study of violence against women: Evolving research agendas into science. Violence Against Women, 15, 393-419. Koss, M. P., & White, J. (2008). National and global agendas on violence against women: Historical perspective and consensus. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 78, 386-393. National Research Council. (1996). Understanding violence against women. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. National Research Council. (2004). Advancing the federal research agenda on violence against women. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. Oxford English Dictionary Online. (2010). Innovation. Retrieved from http://dictionary/oed .com Tashakkori, A., & Teddlie, C. (Eds.). (2010). The SAGE handbook of mixed methods in social and behavioral research (2nd edition). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
