Developing Outcome Instruments for North Carolina Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Services

Over the past year and a half, I've been working with my colleague Dr. Sandy Martin (who is at the UNC-CH School of Public Health) to develop standardized instruments to help North Carolina (NC) domestic violence and sexual assault agencies to assess survivors needs and goals when they first come for services, as well as assess improvements in survivors' needs and goals (i.e., outcomes) as they receive services. The work on this project is generously funded by the NC Governor's Crime Commission.

To understand what types of information should be included in these instruments, we (Sandy, me and a team of very hard working students) conducted (1) a literature review, (2) focus groups with survivors, (3) surveyed directors of NC domestic violence and sexual assault programs, and (4) surveyed NC funders of these services.

Sandy and I developed a report that details what we found out about the types of information each of these groups think is important to include in the development of assessment and outcome instruments. You can access the full report by clicking on the title of this blog posting or here.