Advancing Domestic Violence Program Evaluation: Development and Validation of the Measure of Victim Empowerment Related to Safety (MOVERS)

Background and Purpose:  As budgets tighten and demand for domestic violence services grows, domestic violence programs are facing enormous pressure to demonstrate the impact of their work. A key challenge to doing so is the absence of theoretically grounded outcome measures that reflect programs’ missions and program participants’ goals for themselves.  This study aimed to address this gap through the development and validation of a multidimensional measure of safety-related empowerment. A secondary aim of this study was to draw on and model the benefits to both domestic violence researchers and programs of academic-community partnerships.

Methods:  Through an academic-community partnership with 17 domestic violence programs, we used a participatory approach to develop the Measure of Victim Empowerment Related to Safety (MOVERS) and to evaluate its reliability and validity in a convenience sample of survivors recruited from domestic violence programs across the Northeast. Eligible participants were (a) aged 18 or over and (b) English- or Spanish-speaking. The final sample of 239 women had a mean age of 36.3 with a self-identified racial and ethnic composition of 38% White, 29.1% Black/African American, 20.9% Hispanic/Latina, and 12% other. The sample was evenly divided between residential program (49%) and community-based program (51%) participants. Surveys and consent forms were available in English and Spanish.

Results: Results demonstrated the 13-item measure’s reliability and validity. Exploratory factor analysis yielded three subscales assessing: the extent to which a survivor has developed a set of safety-related goals and a belief in her ability to accomplish them; the survivor’s perception that she has access to the support she needs to move towards safety; and the survivor’s sense that action toward the goal of safety will not cause new problems of equal magnitude in other domains. Confirmatory factor analysis supported the three-factor model.

Conclusions and Implications:  MOVERS provides a tool for assessing a key dimension of survivors’ experience and enables the evaluation of domestic violence program practices in ways that are consistent with core program and survivor goals. Additionally, MOVERS opens the door for research on what factors contribute to safety-related empowerment, and most importantly, whether safety-related empowerment predicts longer-term safety and wellbeing.  Finally, the development of MOVERS provides an example of how academic-community partnerships can produce something powerful and useful that neither academics nor practitioners could produce alone.