Tailoring Domestic Violence Services for Community Needs and Strengths: Findings from a Collaborative Needs Assessment

Background/Purpose: Domestic violence (DV) is a prevalent problem associated with numerous negative consequences for survivors and their families. To ensure all affected families receive help for this serious problem, services must be deeply rooted in the communities in which they are delivered. Nonetheless, there are few practices for determining how best to tailor services to a community’s unique strengths and needs. To help address this gap, a group of service leaders and researchers in one community developed a partnership to conduct a collaborative needs assessment. The project was guided by the following questions: What are the community’s strengths and needs in DV services and response? What are feasible solutions for addressing the community’s needs?

Methods: A mixed-methods approach was employed to address these questions robustly. Specifically, we: (a) conducted focus groups and interviews with stakeholders and surveys with key informants, (b) conducted focus groups and interviews with DV survivors, (c) examined existing DV data sources, and (d) examined the literature for innovative solutions.

This presentation will focus on our collaborative approach, lessons learned, and findings from our completed activities, i.e., data collection with stakeholders via focus groups/interviews and key informants via a survey. These activities focused on gathering participants’ perceptions of community-level strengths and needs in the area of DV services, and suggestions for enhancing the community’s service capacity.

Community stakeholders were professionals whose work directly focused on DV (e.g., advocates, criminal justice). Stakeholders were invited to participate in a focus group or interview to collect in-depth information. Sixty stakeholders participated. Qualitative analysis included strategies to enhance research rigor (e.g., multiple coders, negative case analysis).

Community key informants were professionals whose work touched on DV (e.g., clergy, educators, health care providers). To seek information broadly, key informants were emailed an invitation to complete an electronic survey, which the service leaders and researchers developed in partnership for this study. Quantitative survey data (n=134; 62% response rate) were analyzed descriptively.

Results: A critical need identified by stakeholders and informants was the lack of housing-related services. The majority of survey participants disagreed that current community housing resources and services adequately address survivors’ needs. Qualitative discussions expanded on the need to enhance housing services beyond emergency shelter (e.g., transitional housing, long-term housing), which was echoed by survey participants. Community-level strengths identified by both stakeholders and informants included being a resource rich community with effective DV service providers and having community passion around the issue of DV. Housing trends were offered as innovative approaches for addressing survivors’ housing needs (e.g., housing first models, rapid-rehousing, permanent housing).

Conclusion/Implications: Findings highlight the strengths and needs of a local community in the area of DV services. Together with findings from our other research activities, these results will inform data-driven recommendations for community leaders to enhance the community’s services. To the best of our knowledge, this is among the first efforts to investigate DV service needs and solutions using a community-level research-practice partnership. Accordingly, collaboration strategies, data collection methods/tools, and project recommendations for replication will also be discussed.