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The purpose of this paper is to describe the ongoing data and evaluation strategies being used to document the impact of the Guilford County Family Justice Center, which has been in operation for nearly four years.

There are four primary ongoing data and evaluation strategies used to tell the story of the impact of the family justice center (FJC) on the community: tracking services provided by the FJC, collecting annual data from partner agencies, conducting week-long censuses and doing an annual survey of professionals affiliated with the FJC and its partner organizations. (The current paper reports on the first three of these strategies.)

Methodological limitations of the evaluation strategies used warrant caution in interpreting the findings of the ongoing evaluation of the Guilford County FJC. However, preliminary evaluation findings indicate support for the center’s positive impact on the community it serves, including in the number of clients served, a reduction in domestic violence-related homicide rates and the creation of new community resources that emerged through the FJC partnership.

Each of the evaluation strategies used in this study holds inherent strengths and limitations, which are discussed in the paper. Beyond the future evaluation of local FJCs, a range of rigorous methodologies can be used to further explore the impact of the FJC model. Qualitative methods may be useful for gaining an in-depth understanding of victims’ and survivors’ perceptions of accessing resources through an FJC, as well as for studying beliefs and attitudes toward FJCs among various community stakeholders. Quantitative methods can be used to apply more complex statistical analyses to comparing indicators of the impact of FJCs over time.

The data and evaluation findings from the Guilford County FJC add support to the potential positive impact of the FJC model on communities. These preliminary data suggest that FJCs can impact communities by offering support to victims and coordinating resources among partner organizations. Collaborative partnerships can be leveraged to lead to broader community changes that strengthen community-level responses to interpersonal violence through greater community awareness, opportunities for community members to contribute to solutions and the establishment of new resources that emerge from needs identified through the partnership.

Overall, there is a pressing need for research examining various aspects of the FJC model and identifying factors that contribute to its success at fostering collaboration, supporting victims and survivors, holding offenders accountable and preventing future violence. With the rapid growth of the FJC models, the need for research and evaluation to document the effectiveness and limitations of the model is high.

Designed to serve as a one-stop shop for victims of domestic violence and other forms of violence to seek help, FJCs offer, within a single location, multiple services from a variety of professional disciplines. These services include law enforcement, victim advocacy and prosecution. Although the FJC model is expanding rapidly across the USA and internationally, research to date is limited, and thus, the current paper will add to the research and evaluation basis for the FJC movement.

The purpose of this study is to explore the perspectives held by professionals affiliated with an FJC through a cross-sectional survey. The family justice center (FJC) model is expanding rapidly in the USA and internationally. Despite the rapid growth of the FJC movement, there is a need for more research to document the impact of FJCs on victims and survivors, professionals working in FJCs and the broader community.

The current paper focuses on perspectives of professionals who serve victims of family and interpersonal violence and it includes the results of a four-year, cross-sectional survey of professionals working in a community that established an FJC. Data analyzes examined differences in perspectives of professionals based on timing (i.e. from before an FJC was established to the time when the center was in operation for three years) and based on whether professionals worked primarily onsite at the FJC location.

The findings demonstrated that although some statistically significant differences were identified that suggest a positive impact of an FJC for professionals, more research is needed to further explore how professionals’ perspectives and experiences are impacted through the establishment of an FJC.

This study is the first-known cross-sectional examination of the perspectives of professionals working within an FJC model over a multi-year period.

Studies on restrictive engulfment (RE) – a subtype of psychological aggression in intimate relationships – have focused either on insecure attachment or relationship satisfaction, not both. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to investigate relationship satisfaction as a potential mediator of the associations between anxious and avoidant attachment and RE perpetration among college students.

A sample of 322 college students (178 women, 137 men, and seven other gender-identified) completed the experiences in close relationship inventory, relationship assessment scale, and RE subscale of the multidimensional measure of emotional abuse.

Among the sample, 89.3 and 90.5 percent of the college women and men, respectively, reported to have used isolating, restricting, monitoring, and controlling behaviors. The results of structural equation modeling revealed that all direct paths except for that from avoidant attachment to RE were significant. Moreover, significant indirect paths were identified from anxious and avoidant attachment to RE via relationship satisfaction.

The results of this study should be interpreted with consideration of the study’s limitations. First, the data were drawn from a convenience sample of Turkish college students. Second, the design of the study is correlational; therefore, we cannot assume causality. Finally, this study utilized self-report and retrospective data.

Though the findings are preliminary, they may inform college counselors and other mental health practitioners about the nature of RE within college students’ dating relationships. College students who are unhappy with their dating relationships but still in those relationships (i.e. they choose not to leave) should be assessed for whether they are the perpetrators and/or recipients of psychological aggression, especially in light of the high rates of this form of aggression in the current and previous studies. Furthermore, assessing psychological dating aggression perpetrators for insecure attachment styles may help mental health professionals who work with college students, envisage the sessions toward areas in the need of improvement, such as their views of themselves and others. Self-esteem, feelings of insecurity and inadequacy in relationships, and dependency can be worked with these clients.

The results of this study also have implications for the prevention of psychological aggression before it occurs. The need for prevention programs is evident in the high rates of psychologically controlling behaviors among college students. It may be useful to implement campus wide programs to raise awareness regarding psychological aggression, such as through events, seminars, posters, flyers, and talks with student groups.

Despite the limitations of this study, its findings offer insight into the factors that influence the perpetration of psychological aggression within dating relationships among college students. Adult attachment theory offers a useful lens for understanding the possible driving forces behind college students’ controlling behaviors toward their dating partners. In particular, college students who demonstrate an insecure attachment style – and especially an anxious attachment style – combined with low levels of relationship satisfaction appear to be at a high risk for perpetrating RE behaviors.

This article presents the results of a study involving 261 domestic violence researchers representing a variety of professional disciplines. The purpose of this study was to identify researchers' perceptions of the connections between research and practice in domestic violence. The study builds on previous literature that identified a gap between research and practice in domestic violence. Through a factor analysis of the Domestic Violence Research‐Practice Perceptions Scales: Researcher Form, a new instrument developed for this study, a four‐factor conceptual framework for understanding the domestic violence research‐practice gap was identified. The four factors identified were labelled as follows: (a) personal practice orientation, (b) beliefs about practitioners, (c) beliefs about researchers, and (d) beliefs about a research‐practice gap. Researchers were shown to differ in their scores on the first factor subscale based on whether they had prior experience of providing services to clients affected by domestic violence and whether domestic violence is the primary focus of their research agenda. Implications of the findings for integrating research and practice in domestic violence are then discussed.

Randall W. Eberts, Ph.D., is the executive director of the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, Kalamazoo, Michigan.Mary Hatwood Futrell, Ed.D., is president of Education International (EI), headquartered in Brussels, Belgium, and dean of the Graduate School of Education and Human Development at George Washington University, Washington, DC.Bob Harris, M.A., Dip.T (Sec.), (Australia), advanced study at the Institut Universitaire des Hautes Etudes Internationales, Geneva, is a former EI executive director and current senior consultant based in Nyon, Switzerland.Ronald D. Henderson, Ph.D., is the director of the Research Department at the National Education Association, Washington, DC.Rachel Hendrickson, Ph.D., is the higher education coordinator in the Membership and Organizing Department at the National Education Association, Washington, DC.Kevin Hollenbeck, Ph.D., is a senior economist and director of publications at the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, Kalamazoo, Michigan.Susan Moore Johnson, Ed.D., is Carl H. Pforzheimer, Jr., Professor of Teaching and Learning at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, Massachusetts.Charles T. Kerchner, Ph.D., is Hollis P. Allen Professor of Education at the Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California.Julia E. Koppich, Ph.D., is president of Koppich & Associates, an education policy research and consulting firm, in San Francisco, California.Carrie M. Lewis, J.D., is a senior writer-editor in the Government Relations Department at the National Education Association, Washington, DC.Christine Maitland, Ph.D., is a former higher education coordinator for the National Education Association who now works on higher education issues with the NEA’s Pacific Regional Office in Burlingame, California.Christine E. Murray, Ph.D., is a professor in the Department of Education and Human Development and dean of the School of Professions, State University of New York College at Brockport.Diane Shust, J.D., M.S.Ed., is the director of the Government Relations Department at the National Education Association, Washington, DC.Joe A. Stone, Ph.D., is W. E. Miner Professor of Economics at the University of Oregon, Eugene.Wayne J. Urban, Ph.D., is Regents’ Professor of Education in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at Georgia State University, Atlanta.Fred van Leeuwen is the general secretary of Education International, Brussels, Belgium.Maris A. Vinovskis, Ph.D., is Bentley Professor of History, senior research scientist at the Institute for Social Research, and faculty member of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.Paul Wolman, Ph.D., is a senior policy analyst in the Research Department at the National Education Association, Washington, DC.

There is a growing emphasis on the need to integrate research and practice in the fields of domestic and sexual violence. However, additional research is needed to identify strategies for key stakeholders to use to bridge research and practice in these areas. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The current study analyzed qualitative data collected during a statewide conference for researchers and practitioners whose work addresses domestic and/or sexual violence.

The findings provide information about building effective researcher-practitioner collaborations, developing methodologically sound studies that address practice-relevant research questions, and identifying steps that funders, state coalitions, researchers, and practitioners can take to advance the integration of research and practice.

Additional research is needed to evaluate specific approaches to better integrating research and practice related to domestic and sexual violence.

Researcher-practitioner collaborations offer numerous benefits to advancing research and practice related to domestic and sexual violence. Additional guidance and tangible support is needed to foster these collaborations.

This study used data collected during an innovative conference that brought together researchers and practitioners. The data have implications for furthering the integration of research and practice related to domestic and sexual violence.

The public has long been led to believe that the connection between teacher unions and quality education is negligible or even a contradiction in terms. For an example of that view, one barely needs to go beyond the title of a 1996 U.S. News & World Report cover story, “Why Teachers Don’t Teach.” The story essentially tells the public that the teacher unions bear most of the blame, that they have used their money and muscle to preserve their own privileges and to stave off efforts at reforms aimed at improving educational quality. The two major teacher unions, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA), are the main targets of this criticism.

Soon after Dal Lawrence became the first president of the Toledo Federation of Teachers (TFT) in 1967, he began an effort to expand the union’s role in teachers’ evaluations. Throughout most of the 1970s, the union pressed for greater job protection as well as a peer evaluation program for new teachers; a proposal that the school district refused repeatedly over that decade. In the 1981 contract negotiation, however, the district declared itself willing to include the issue, provided that the union would consider an intervention program for nonperforming teachers. This agreement – now in its third decade, despite a number of conflicts between the district and the union over the years – provided a framework for a totally new process of teacher assessment based on peer evaluation, the Toledo Plan (American Educator, 1984; Bradley, 1998b; Lawton, 1996). In the Toledo Plan, for the first time, teachers would be evaluating each other’s work, with real consequences for those who were not able to successfully meet agreed-upon expectations. “The idea of a teacher union evaluating members of its own bargaining unit was so controversial,” noted Gallegher, Lanier, and Kerchner (1993), “that the TFT president Dal Lawrence waited several months before telling a shocked American Federation of Teachers (AFT) executive council what he had done” (p. 158).

Recently, there has been increased attention to community- and neighborhood-level influences on rates and experiences of intimate partner violence (IPV). The purpose of this paper is to describe the use of geographic information systems (GIS) to geographically analyze these influences in order to enhance community-level understanding of and responses to IPV.

The authors review existing literature supporting the needs for this level of analysis, and then they present eight steps for researchers and practitioners to use when applying GIS to analyze IPV.

This is a conceptual paper.

This paper offers researchers and practitioners suggested strategies for using GIS analyses to examine community-level influences on IPV in future research.

The practical implications of using GIS analyses are discussed, including ways that the findings of these analyses can be used to enhance community-level resources to prevent and respond to IPV.

This innovative, interdisciplinary approach offers new insights into understanding and addressing IPV at a community level.

To date, there has been minimal research used to apply GIS analyses to the problem of IPV in communities. This paper presents a framework for future researchers and practitioners to apply this methodology to expand on community-level understanding of IPV.