Supporting South Asian Social Workers: Learning from the Lived Experiences of South Asian Women's Organizations' Providers

Background and Purpose: South Asian Women’s Organizations (SAWOs) serve victims of intimate partner violence (IPV) and are increasing nationwide to meet the culturally specific needs of the South Asian diaspora. SAWOs offer support services such as counseling, legal aide, and case management and are primarily staffed by South Asian American professionals. Client-provider ethnic match supports positive treatment outcomes, however other favorable methods of responsive practice have not been well defined from providers’ perspectives. Limited research has attempted to highlight SAWO providers’ voices for understanding and sustaining responsive practice in the South Asian community. As providers are central to a victim’s recovery, SAWO providers’ insights into culturally responsive service provision for abused South Asian populations will be discussed.

Methods: In accordance with hermeneutic phenomenology, interviews were selected as the ideal data collection method for purposes of sufficiently explicating the phenomenon studied. Eight in-depth interviews were conducted with South Asian SAWO providers in the northeast region of the U.S. A structured analytic approach was used to describe the essence of the population. Interviews were transcribed to capture all lexical and non-lexical responses of the participant and interviewer and analyzed several times. Meaning units were identified, insights were clustered into 16 provisional themes, and imaginative variation was applied to deduce four core themes.

Results: The experience of being a mental health provider who worked with South Asian survivors of IPV was grounded in a profound sense of commitment and passion to end violence. Data analyzed from eight individual interviews revealed distinct themes that highlighted the lived experiences of providers working with IPV survivors within their community. These essential elements are described through: (1) disrupting the status quo, (2) resiliency, (3) examining assumptions of identity, and (4) pushing professional boundaries. Examples drawn from transcripts describe and explain the themes that offer insights into providers’ experiences and subsequently impact culturally sensitive service provision.

Conclusions and Implications: These initial findings offer insight into sustaining South Asian mental health providers committed to serving domestic violence survivors in their community. Providers shared significant experiences that described the essential elements of being a practitioner, revealing innovative insights into culturally responsive service provision. The findings demonstrated there needs to be a better understanding of how U.S. professional mandates impact providers’ capacities in offering culturally sensitive service provision. Providers would benefit from group-level interventions, such as peer support, and require flexibility in the current professional mandates to build ethnically sensitive relationships. Future research should highlight the various forms of self-care used by providers to demonstrate where greater supports are needed.