Swedish women reaching post-traumatic growth after an intimate partner violence relationship: A study of formal help and growth after trauma

AIMS

This study examined whether women in Sweden who had been in an intimate partner violence (IPV) relationship reached post-traumatic growth (PTG) and if the level of PTG differed for women who had received formal help compared with women who had not received formal help. The study also examined whether there was a difference in the level of PTG depending on which type of formal help the women had received.

METHODS

The data were collected through an online self-report survey. A total of 166 women took part in the study.

RESULTS

The results showed that 69.3% (n = 115) of the women reported a pre-determined or higher level of PTG attainment and that those who had received formal help reported a higher level of PTG than those who had not received formal help. There was no difference in the level of PTG depending on which type of formal help the women had received.

CONCLUSIONS

The majority of the Swedish women in this study who had lived in an IPV relationship attained PTG. Although formal help appeared to help the women attain PTG, the type of the formal help did not seem to have a crucial role in attaining different levels of PTG. These findings are discussed in the light of the future research directions and public health measures to better support women who experience IPV.

Intimate Partner Violence in El Salvador: A Relationship Between Femicide Attempts and Barriers to Help-Seeking

Research has examined the relationship between femicides, understood as the killing of any woman, and intimate partner violence (IPV). Additionally, women have been found to seek out formal help when they deem their experiences to be severe, yet many reasons prevent them from doing so; hindering our ability to interrupt the cycle of violence and further victimization. Using the Salvadoran 2017 Violence Against Women National Survey, this study examines the relationships between femicide attempts, IPV, and formal help-seeking. We find a significant positive relationship between experiencing a femicide attempt and IPV, and specific reasons for not seeking formal help.

Help-Seeking Behaviors for Intimate Partner Violence Among College Students: Implications for Intimate Partner Violence Prevention and Intervention

This study applied Andersen's Model of Health Service Use to examine help-seeking behaviors for intimate partner violence (IPV) and predisposing, enabling, and need factors for help-seeking among college students. The sample (N = 2,719) consisted of those who experienced IPV and was recruited from six universities in the United States and one university in Canada through an online survey. Results showed that 45.4% of the sample had sought some form of help for IPV. The most utilized source of formal help was from medical services, and friends were the number one source of informal help. Gender, age, sexual orientation (predisposing factors), IPV training (enabling factor), experiencing psychological and technological violence, and IPV consequences (need factors) were associated with seeking help. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Patterns of Intimate Partner Violence Victimization and Survivors' Help-Seeking

Intimate partner violence (IPV) survivors often do not seek critically needed help. A good understanding of the relationship between the pattern of violence and help-seeking is critical to developing adequate services for the survivors, as well as for reaching out to those who do not seek help. This study used the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey to examine how IPV survivor's help-seeking varies, depending on the characteristics of the survivors and the pattern of victimization. Logistic regression analyses were conducted, with the survivors' help-seeking and use of formal or informal help as the dependent variables. The study results show that women are the primary victims of IPV, that the pattern of victimization is associated with both whether survivors seek help or not, and which help sources they utilize, if any. IPV consequences are also associated with survivors' help-seeking, as are demographic factors such as age, gender, race, and immigration status.

The indispensable intermediaries: a qualitative study of informal caregivers' struggle to achieve influence at and after hospital discharge

BACKGROUND

The care policy and organization of the care sector is shifting to accommodate projected demographic changes and to ensure a sustainable model of health care provision in the future. Adult children and spouses are often the first to assume care giving responsibilities for older adults when declining function results in increased care needs. By introducing policies tailored to enabling family members to combine gainful employment with providing care for older relatives, the sustainability of the future care for older individuals in Norway is more explicitly placed on the family and informal caregivers than previously. Care recipients and informal caregivers are expected to take an active consumer role and participate in the care decision-making process. This paper aims to describe the informal caregivers' experiences of influencing decision-making at and after hospital discharge for home-bound older relatives.

METHODS

This paper reports findings from a follow-up study with an exploratory qualitative design. Qualitative telephone interviews were conducted with 19 informal caregivers of older individuals discharged from hospital in Norway. An inductive thematic content analysis was undertaken.

RESULTS

Informal caregivers take on comprehensive all-consuming roles as intermediaries between the care recipient and the health care services. In essence, the informal caregivers take the role of the active participant on behalf of their older relative. They describe extensive efforts struggling to establish dialogues with the "gatekeepers" of the health care services. Achieving the goal of the best possible care for the care recipient seem to depend on the informal caregivers having the resources to choose appropriate strategies for gaining influence over decisions.

CONCLUSIONS

The care recipients' extensive frailty and increasing dependence on their families coupled with the complexity of health care services contribute to the perception of the informal caregivers' indispensable role as intermediaries. These findings accentuate the need to further discuss how frail older individuals and their informal caregivers can be supported and enabled to participate in decision-making regarding care arrangements that meet the care recipient's needs.

A survey of preferences of italian students

Help-seeking preferences for mental health are a crucial aspect to design strategies to support adolescents in an emotionally delicate life phase. Informal help-seeking is usually preferred but little was published about preferences in different cultures, and it is not clear whether informal and formal help are mutually exclusive or whether they are part of the same overall propensity to help-seeking. In a survey of 710 students in Milan, Italy, help-seeking propensity measured through an Italian version of the General Help-Seeking Questionnaire was high, similar in males and females (mean total score 3.8, DS 0.9); few (9%) tended not to seek help. The most-preferred source of help was a friend, then father or mother, partner, psychologist and psychiatrist. 355 students (55%) reported high propensity to seek both informal and formal help; 33 (5%) would only seek formal help. Help-seeking should be promoted in itself, rather than indicating professionals and professional settings as primary sources of help.

Instrumental help and caregivers' distress: effects of change in informal and formal help

Family caregivers of persons with dementia rely on a range of resources to provide care and cope with caregiving stressors. Informal (unpaid) and formal (paid) instrumental support contribute to diverse caregiver outcomes. Previous research of caregiver support has focused on subjective measures of help or has compared caregivers receiving formal services to those who do not. We focused instead on the effects of change in the amount of formal and informal instrumental assistance on caregivers' distress. We expected that greater gains in assistance would be associated with greater reduction of caregivers' distress. Increases informal but not informal levels of assistance were associated with improvement in each measure of distress. Additional measures may be needed to fully understand the effects of informal and formal assistance.