La Strada Documentation Center

Researching Violence against Women. A Practical Guide for Researchers and Activists

Document number
1393
Date
2005
Title
Researching Violence against Women. A Practical Guide for Researchers and Activists
Author/publisher
World Health Organisation (WHO), PATH
Availability
View/save PDF version of this document
Document type(s)
Training Material/Resources,
Keywords
Health, Development, Domestic violence, Gender-based violence, Data collection, Data analysis
Summary
This manual has been developed in response to the growing need to improve the quality, quantity, and comparability of international data on physical and sexual abuse. It outlines some of the methodological and ethical challenges of conducting research on violence against women and describes a range of innovative techniques that have been used to address these challenges. The manual draws on the collective experiences and insights of many individuals, most notably the members of the International Research Network on Violence Against Women (IRNVAW), an ad hoc group of researchers and activists that meets periodically to share experiences regarding research on violence. This manual is written for anyone interested in the application of social science and public health research methods to the study of gender-based violence. It is designed for researchers who want to know more about adapting traditional research techniques to the special case of investigating physical and sexual abuse. And it is designed for activists, community workers, and service providers who want to become conversant in methodological issues. One of the goals of this manual is to facilitate collaborations between researchers and community- based workers and activists by providing practitioners with an introduction to the tools and language of research, and by giving researchers greater insight into the specific issues that accompany research on violence. For the sake of brevity, this manual focuses primarily on the issue of violence against women by their intimate partners. Gender-based violence assumes many forms, including rape, sexual assault and coercion, stalking, incest, sexual harassment, female genital mutilation, and trafficking in women. Although many of the insights presented herein will apply to these other types of violence, no single manual could exhaustively address all forms of abuse. The manual is directed particularly to those researchers interested in the intersection of violence and health in developing countries, given the clear impact that gender violence has on women’s health status.
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