Preventing repeat incidents of family violence: analysis of data from three field experiments

Abstract

Preventing repeat victimization is an area of criminology that has shown particular promise in recent years. Based on the premise that persons once victimized are at higher risk than others for future victimization, British officials developed successful programs that focus crime prevention efforts on victims. Of all crimes, family violence may have the highest repeat rate, especially in the first weeks after an incident is reported to the police. Accordingly, New York City officials developed an intervention program to reduce repeat incidents of family abuse. Three field experiments conducted during the 1990s evaluated whether or not this program, targeted at public housing residents who reported family violence to the police, reduced the rate of subsequent victimization. The findings produced within each study were not consistent across the studies; rather, these three experiments, separately analyzed, produce varying results. Since the composition of the samples varied across studies, however, one possible explanation is that this program has different effects within different populations. This paper reports outcomes from a series of analyses of pooled data from these three studies to address the inconsistencies. The results indicate that the intervention brought about greater reporting of subsequent abuse, both to authorities and to research interviewers. The results are invariant across the three studies, indicating that greater reporting of abuse is not idiosyncratic to one particular population, and are consistent across the nature and source of outcome measures. These findings suggest the need for careful monitoring by the advocates and agencies that operate these types of programs and among those designing and testing future programs.

Preventing repeat incidents of family violence: a randomized field test of a second responder program

“…The New York series of experiments were specifically designed to test the effects of second response programs using true experimental designs, the "gold standard" in research methodologies. A pooled analysis conducted by Davis et al (2006) reanalyzed data from three separate field experiments, each testing the same intervention on somewhat different populations. The pooled analyses consistently indicated that the interventions were associated with an increase in reporting of new abusive incidents to authorities and to research interviewers.…”

Experimental Analysis of Attitudes: The Factorial-Survey Approach

“…Based on these definitions, we can understand why both politicians, lobbyists, products' manufacturers, and also sellers, spend billions of dollars every year trying to create favorable attitudes toward their ideas or products. 4 Generally, the evaluative component of an attitude can be thought of as having both a direction (either positive or negative), and an intensity (ranging from very weak to very strong feelings). Accordingly, attitudes are seen as providing an efficient way to size up the world, and they influence the way in which a person perceives and responds to it (Allport, 1935 [22]; Thomas & Znaniecki, 1918 [23]).…”

“…The answer lies in the processes of social learning or socialization. Attitudes may be formed: first, through reinforcement, that is, by instrumental learning, based on direct experience with the object, through associations of stimuli and responses; second, through classical conditioning, that is, a neutral stimulus gradually acquires the ability to elicit a response through repeated association with other stimuli that elicit that response; or/and third, by observing (significant) others-this mechanism is defined as observational learning, by which another source of attitudes is the social environment-parents, siblings, family, teachers, community leaders, and also the media, especially television and films (Ajzen & Fishbein,4 One of the important problems in this area is the use that politicians and policymakers often make of the results of such surveys, in order to justify a certain policy on the basis of "this is what the people want." The problem is that such surveys reveal only a superficial part of public opinion, so policymakers decide without having the whole picture.…”

The impact of length of domestic violence treatment on the patterns of subsequent intimate partner violence

“…In addition, the district attorney's computer database was searched to determine whether the victim in the new incident was the same as the victim in the original incident. In keeping with common practice in the field (e.g., Davis et al, 2006b;Feder and Dugan 2002;Maxwell et al 2002), we included only instances involving the same victim and perpetrator. To reduce measurement error, we combined the CJA arrest reports and the police complaint data into one measure that captured the number of documented police recorded incidents (e.g., arrests or crime complaints) involving the defendant and victim at any time after the treatment was assigned.…”