Ethically Driven and Methodologically Tailored: Setting the Agenda for Systematic Reviews in Domestic Violence and Abuse

Abstract

Purpose Systematic reviews have an important, and growing, role to play in the global evidence eco-system of domestic violence and abuse. Alongside substantive contributions to knowledge, such reviews stimulate debates about ethical reviewing practices and the importance of tailoring methods to the nuances of the field. This paper aims to pinpoint a set of ethical and methodological priorities to guide and enhance review practices specifically in the field of domestic abuse. Method The five Pillars of the Research Integrity Framework (ethical guidelines for domestic abuse research) are used to interrogate the systematic review process. To do so, the Framework is retrospectively applied to a recently completed systematic review in domestic abuse. The review included a rapid systematic map and in-depth analysis of interventions aimed at creating or enhancing informal support and social networks for victim-survivors of abuse. Results Ethical and methodological priorities for systematic reviews in domestic abuse include (1) Safety and wellbeing: maintaining the wellbeing of researchers and stakeholders, and appraising the ethics of included studies, (2) Transparency/ accountability: transparent reporting of research funding, aims and methods together with explicit consideration of authorship of outputs, (3) Equality, human rights and social justice: developing diverse review teams/ Advisory groups, and review methods that aim to search for, and report, diverse perspectives. Considering researcher positionality/ reflexivity in the review, (4) Engagement: collaboration with non-academic stakeholders and individuals with lived experience throughout the review process, (5) Research Ethics: independent ethical scrutiny of systematic review proposals with input from researchers with expertise in systematic reviews and domestic abuse. Conclusion Additional research is required to comprehensively examine the ethics of each stage of the review process. In the meantime, attention should be given to the underpinning ethical framework for our systematic review practices and the wider research infrastructure that governs reviews.

Training Informal Supporters to Improve Responses to Victim-Survivors of Domestic Violence and Abuse: A Systematic Review

“…A mixed method review (Grant & Booth, 2009) aimed to examine effectiveness, and perceived effectiveness, of education/training for informal supporters. Recognizing the dearth of rigorous intervention studies in DVA (Bell & Coates, 2022; Feder et al, 2011) and the prominence of research from non-governmental organizations (Konya et al, 2020), the review aimed to include diverse study designs and maximize available data (Schucan Bird et al, 2023). This meant that the review recognized the value and contribution of quantitative and qualitative data, including from the gray literature, following precedent set by previous reviews of informal support interventions (Konya et al, 2020; Ogbe et al, 2020).…”

Enabling Workplace and Community Responses to Domestic Abuse: A Mixed Method Systematic Review of Training for Informal Supporters

“…Tese themes were translated into recommendations [50]. In the second stage, these recommendations were juxtaposed with studies that reported quantitative fndings from quasiexperimental evaluations of the interventions (reported separately in [53]). Tis allowed for comparison of the recommendations from the qualitative studies with evidence of efectiveness [50].…”

“…Included studies were used to assess whether each of the ten recommended features were supported by robust, quantitative evidence of efect. Tis was based on fndings of efectiveness reported separately (as reported in [53]).…”