Cumulative lifetime violence severity scale: development and initial testing among men.

Background: Knowledge of the relationship between men's health and violence is flawed by narrow and faulty conceptualization and measurement of violence that often results in attribution of health problems to one form or type of violence without consideration of other exposures. Our purpose is to describe the development and initial testing of the Cumulative Lifetime Violence Severity scale designed for use in health research to measure men's perceptions of the severity of their cumulative lifetime violence.

Methods: We framed the dimensions of violence severity as: type (physical, psychological, sexual), timing (childhood, adulthood), focus (perpetrator, target), context, frequency, and degree of distress.

Reclaiming Our Spirits: Development and Pilot Testing of a Health Promotion Intervention for Indigenous Women Who Have Experienced Intimate Partner Violence.

Indigenous women are subjected to high rates of multiple forms of violence, including intimate partner violence (IPV), in the context of ongoing colonization and neo-colonization. Health promotion interventions for women who experience violence have not been tailored specifically for Indigenous women. Reclaiming Our Spirits (ROS) is a health promotion intervention designed for Indigenous women living in an urban context in Canada.

The process, outcomes, and challenges of feasibility studies conducted in partnership with stakeholders: a health intervention for women survivors of intimate partner violence.

Feasibility studies play a crucial role in determining whether complex, community-based interventions should be subject to efficacy testing. Reports of such studies often focus on efficacy potential but less often examine other elements of feasibility, such as acceptance by clients and professionals, practicality, and system integration, which are critical to decisions for proceeding with controlled efficacy testing. Although stakeholder partnership in feasibility studies is widely suggested to facilitate the research process, strengthen relevance, and increase knowledge transfer, little is written about how this occurs or its consequences and outcomes.

A theory-based primary health care intervention for women who have left abusive partners.

Although intimate partner violence is a significant global health problem, few tested interventions have been designed to improve women's health and quality of life, particularly beyond the crisis of leaving. The Intervention for Health Enhancement After Leaving is a comprehensive, trauma informed, primary health care intervention, which builds on the grounded theory Strengthening Capacity to Limit Intrusion and other research findings. Delivered by a nurse and a domestic violence advocate working collaboratively with women through 6 components (safeguarding, managing basics, managing symptoms, cautious connecting, renewing self, and regenerating family), this promising intervention is in the early phases of testing.

Daughters' obligation to care in the context of past abuse.

Using theoretical sampling, we extended a previous grounded theory study of women's caring through interviews with 16 women currently giving care to parents who had abused them as children to more fully understand daughters' obligation to care in the context of past abuse. Past relationship was characterized by emotional distance, "never being good enough," degradation, control, and unpredictability. Obligation to care was grounded not only in duty to others but also in duty to self.

Pathways of chronic pain in survivors of intimate partner violence.

Objective: To examine the roles of lifetime abuse-related injury, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptom severity, and depressive symptom severity in mediating the effects of severity of assaultive intimate partner violence (IPV), psychological IPV, and child abuse on chronic pain severity in women survivors of IPV.

Methods: Structural equation modeling of data from a community sample of 309 women survivors of IPV was used to test partial and full theoretical models of the relationships among the variables of interest.

Results: The full model had good fit and accounted for 40.

Effects of workplace bullying on how women work.

Work is central to well-being but working is problematic when people experience workplace bullying, which includes psychological, physical, and sexual abuse or harassment. The purpose of the present grounded theory study was to extend current understanding, from the perspective of women, of how workplace bullying affects their work and how they engage in the workforce. The study was conducted in eastern Canada with 36 English-speaking women who had been bullied in the workplace.

Workplace bullying in health care affects the meaning of work.

Our purpose in this grounded theory study was to explore the impact of workplace bullying (WPB) on women working in health care. We analyzed interviews with 21 women, professionals and nonprofessionals. The women experienced a change in their meaning of work (MOW) when they had experienced WPB, and they addressed this change through a process we called the shifting meaning of work.

Abuse-related injury and symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder as mechanisms of chronic pain in survivors of intimate partner violence.

Objective: To examine the role of abuse-related injury and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptom severity in mediating the effects of assaultive intimate partner violence (IPV) severity, psychological IPV severity, and child abuse severity on chronic pain severity in women survivors of IPV.

Methods: Using data collected from a community sample of 309 women survivors of IPV, structural equation modeling was used to test a theoretical model of the relationships among the key variables.

Results: The theoretical model accounted for almost 38% of the variance in chronic pain severity.

Modelling the effects of intimate partner violence and access to resources on women's health in the early years after leaving an abusive partner.

Although the negative health effects of intimate partner violence (IPV) are well documented, little is known about the mechanisms or determinants of health outcomes for women who had left their abusive partners. Using data collected from a community sample of 309 Canadian women who left an abusive partner, we examined whether women's personal, social and economic resources mediate the relationships between the severity of past IPV and current health using structural equation modelling. A good fit was found between the model and data for hypothesized models of mental and physical health.

Patterns of medication use among women survivors of intimate partner violence.

Objective: Our objective was to describe patterns of medication use in a convenience sample of 309 women with a history of intimate partner violence (IPV) participating in a study of women's health after leaving an abusive partner (WHES).

Methods: Using data collected through interviews and health assessments, frequencies of past-month use of medications; abuse experienced, health problems and medical diagnoses; and selected demographics were calculated. Associations among abuse history, employment status, health problems, diagnoses, and medications were explored.

Chronic pain in women survivors of intimate partner violence.

Unlabelled: In this descriptive study of chronic pain in a community sample of 292 women who had separated from their abusive partners on average 20 months previously, more than one-third experienced high disability pain as measured by Von Korff's Chronic Pain Grade. Beyond the usual pain locations associated with abuse, 43.2% reported swollen/painful joints.

The effects of past relationship and obligation on health and health promotion in women caregivers of adult family members.

The social expectation that women will care for family members persists despite evidence that many women have difficult or abusive past relationships with their parents and partners. Little is known about how past relationship influences the health of women caring for adult family members. On the basis of earlier grounded theory research, we tested the theory that past relationship and obligation predict health outcomes and health promotion in 236 women caregivers of adult family members.

Using grounded theory to generate a theoretical understanding of the effects of child custody policy on women's health promotion in the context of intimate partner violence.

Women's health is frequently influenced by social and structural factors, largely beyond women's control, and often entrenched in public policy. Although health is acknowledged to be socially determined, the ways that social conditions affect health are rarely explicated. Grounded theory is a useful method for discovering how structural conditions influence patterns of behavior.

Strengthening capacity to limit intrusion: theorizing family health promotion in the aftermath of woman abuse.

Children's health is a key factor in women's decisions to leave abusive partners, yet how these families promote their health after leaving is poorly understood. In this feminist grounded theory study, the authors conducted repeat interviews with 40 single-parent families that had left abusive partners/fathers and analyzed the data using constant comparative methods. Findings reveal the central problem faced by families is intrusion, unwanted interference in everyday life that stems from abuse and its fallout.

Regenerating family: strengthening the emotional health of mothers and children in the context of intimate partner violence.

Although concern for their children's well-being is pivotal in mothers' decisions to leave abusive partners, rarely is lone-parent family life after leaving framed as beneficial for family members' emotional health. In this feminist grounded theory study of family health promotion in the aftermath of intimate partner violence, we learned that families strengthen their emotional health by purposefully replacing previously destructive patterns of interaction with predictable, supportive ways of getting along in a process called regenerating family. These findings add to our knowledge of family development and how families promote their health when they have experienced intimate partner violence.

Intrusion: the central problem for family health promotion among children and single mothers after leaving an abusive partner.

Like other single-parent families, those consisting of mothers and their children who leave abusive partners/fathers are broadly viewed a deficient, high-risk structures in which children are susceptible to multiple problems. The mechanisms of strength and vulnerability in these families are poorly understood, and, consequently, their health promotion processes remain virtually unexplored. In a feminist grounded theory study of health promotion processes of single-parent families after leaving abusive partners/fathers, the authors discovered intrusion to be the basic social problem as families strive to promote health in the aftermath of abuse.

Illuminating social determinants of women's health using grounded theory.

Emphasis in health policy has shifted from curative intervention to prevention and health promotion through personal responsibility for lifestyle choices and, most recently, to the social determination of health. These shifts draw attention to and legitimize women's health research that moves beyond biomedical, epidemiological, and subjective knowledge to question previously unquestioned societal norms and structures that influence women's health. The challenge is to avoid relying solely on population-based studies that support relationships between social determinants and indicators of women's health and to find ways to illuminate the processes by which social determinants interact with the health of specific groups of women.