Using the Life History Calendar and Multi-Level Modeling to Examine Intimate Partner Violence over Time

Intimate partner violence (IPV), which includes physical, sexual, psychological, and economic abuse, as well as coercive control and stalking, affects millions of women and girls around the world. In the U.S., over one-third of women report experiencing some form of IPV victimization during their lifetime, with a majority reporting that their first experience occurred during adolescence or young adulthood. IPV is associated with myriad health and mental health sequelae, and as such represents a serious public health problem as well as an important area of research and practice for the social work profession.

As research on IPV has evolved, there has been a call for methods that can effectively capture the diversity of women's IPV experiences over time. The life history calendar (LHC), coupled with multi-level modeling (MLM), is an innovative approach that allows us to map out IPV trajectories and examine between-persons and within-person change over time; the resultant findings can then be used to inform prevention and intervention efforts, as well as policy reform.

The workshop presenters will introduce the LHC approach and its broad applicability to the study of factors that shape the life course; the introduction will include appropriate research questions, basic steps in designing an LHC study, and pitfalls to avoid. The workshop will be structured as an interactive lecture format, with ample opportunity for participants to engage in discussion and ask questions about the LHC and MLM. The presenters will provide materials (e.g., a calendar, a coding book, a snippet of a data file) to participants, to illustrate the lecture content. They will draw extensively on their own research studies involving the use of LHC and MLM to examine IPV, which will enhance participant understanding of the information being presented.

Following an overview of the LHC method, its origins and basic tenets, the first presenter will describe instrument development and her empirical study documenting improved memory recall among IPV survivors when interviewed with the LHC, in comparison to a conventional survey interview. Drawing from her LHC studies in Detroit, Tokyo, and San Francisco, she will demonstrate how an LHC/MLM approach enables examination of the changing probability of IPV victimization and help-seeking efforts over time, as well as variations by salient social positionalities such as immigration status and age. The second presenter will offer examples from the LHC studies she has conducted with young women, including a pilot project examining the role of cumulative victimization in influencing the trajectory of physical IPV victimization across adolescence, as well as more recent studies focused on predictors of IPV (physical, sexual, and coercive control) using a relationship-level approach. She will emphasize the use of MLM to analyze LHC data, including setting up a person-period data file, conceptual and analytical decisions about variables, and the iterative process of exploring predictors of between-persons and within-persons change in IPV over time.

Upon workshop completion, participants will have gained a conceptual yet practical understanding of the essential components of an LHC/MLM approach, including its applicability to their own work.