Title : Ecological Model of Battered Women ’ s Experience over Time

To provide better customer service, NCJRS has made this Federally-funded grant final report available electronically in addition to traditional paper copies. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We wish to thank the National Institute of Justice for their generous support and to our project officers, Bernard Auchter and Leora Rosen for their guidance and thoughtful assistance. We also acknowledge the collaboration and support from the Lt. Governor / Attorney General Family Violence Council under the direction of Attorney General J. Ginnina Stevenson. Follow-up phone interviewers contributed endless hours day and night to maintain contact and interview participants: Feurer. We are also grateful for ongoing help with data analysis from Margret Bell, Catherine Glenn, and Sarah Weintraub. We also appreciate the assistance provided by Elizabeth Krause, a post-doc researcher. 3 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Although research on intimate partner violence (IPV) has proliferated over the past 25 years, we still know relatively little about how battered women's experience of abuse and its consequences changes over time, especially during and following specific community and legal interventions. Indeed, the Panel on Research on Violence Against Women, established by the National Research Council in 1995, recommended that " longitudinal research should be undertaken to study the developmental trajectory of violence against women" (Crowell & Burgess, 1996, p. 90). This study was designed to deepen our understanding of IPV victims' experience over time. Specific goals of the study were to examine 1) trajectories of intimate partner violence; 2) trajectories of employment and emotional wellbeing for victims of intimate partner violence; 3) potential predictors of these patterns, identified based on an ecological or contextual model (Bronfenbrenner, 1986), and 4) the prediction of revictimization. This model situates the individual and her characteristics within her larger social context by investigating the influence of a broader set of factors on individual-level phenomena. Thus, this study goes beyond individual characteristics of the batterer or victim to identify contributors to patterns of IPV that are rooted in the larger community and the battered women's social support system. Over the course of seven months (June, 1999 to January, 2000) we recruited a total of 406 women as they sought help for intimate violence at the hands of a current or former male partner. Following an initial interview at one of three sites in Baltimore (Time …