Gender-based violence is a pervasive threat to women not only in the US, but also around the entire world. The WHO estimates 1 in 3 women experiences some form of gender-based violence during their lifetimes, which is absolutely shocking and horrifying. What’s even worse is the trauma that survivors sustain from their experiences that can drastically impact ever facet of their lives. The premise of my research project is creating a tool that mental health professionals can use in order to evaluate the extent to which survivors have recovered from their trauma. I’m super passionate about survivor health, so this independent project is my way of advocating for them and their health.
During the school year, my mentor and I took a look at 24 body maps from a set of interviews conducted with survivors of gender-based violence (GBV). The specific interview is called the Clinical Ethnographic Narrative Interview (CENI), and it was actually developed by my mentor. It’s a neat tool because it utilizes interviewing techniques/questions that focus on learning about a survivor’s sociocultural background as well as their trauma without risking retraumatization. Body maps from the interviews are an opportunity for survivors to illustrate how they feel emotionally, physically, spiritually, etc on a blank outline of a body that represents themselves. Although body maps are a great source of qualitative information, there is no quantitative way to evaluate them. Body maps have been used by art therapists and other professionals for a while, so my mentor and I sought to create a quantitative tool to evaluate extent of trauma recovery based on survivors’ body maps.
I completed putting together a quantitative rubric to code body maps, but just developing the tool isn’t enough. My mentor instructed me that I need to apply it to additional data and present those results as well to validate the rubric. That was the inspiration for my WAGSFP project. My project mentor has a set of quantitative data from the same set of 24 GBV survivors about their mental health indicators (ex. depression, PTSD, childhood sexual assault, etc.). We are going to compare the codes from my rubrics to the mental health indicators and see if any patterns arise. What concrete insight can my body map rubrics provide into survivors’ mental health? That’s the question I hope to answer with my research project. I know that was a lot, so if anyone has any questions please email me or message me!
Anyways, I’m excited for our next seminar meeting tomorrow on research ethics. I think research ethics is such an important topic, especially when it comes to dealing with sensitive data about experiences with assault like I am with my project. Doing the PEERRS training, I learned a lot about responsibly conducting ethical research as well as expectations for appropriate behavior as a researcher. I’m looking forward to continuing learning about some of those topics tomorrow!
I would love to hear a little bit about how the WAGSFP research ethics seminar helped you think about the role of research ethics in your project.
-Emily