Tell Us About It: Victim Research Convos

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In this CVR podcast series, we talk with those doing research and serving victims and learn about the work they've done together.

Tell Us About It, Episode 12: Using Community-Based Participatory Research in a Domestic Violence Context, Part 2

A convo with Lisa Goodman & Ronit BarkaiApr 19Time: 23:20

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On this episode of Tell Us About It, we share the second part of our conversation with Lisa Goodman and Ronit Barkai on the Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) Toolkit. In this part of the discussion, we delve into the CBPR Toolkit itself – the impetus behind its development, what the Toolkit offers both researchers and practitioners, and each women’s role in its development.

Lisa Goodman is the lead author of the CBPR Toolkit and the co-founder of the Domestic Violence Program Evaluation and Research Collaborative. She is also a faculty member in the Counseling and Developmental Psychology program at Boston College.

Ronit Barkai is the co-founder of the Domestic Violence Program Evaluation and Research Collaborative, and a contributor to the CBPR Toolkit. She is also the Assistant Director of Transition House, a domestic violence agency based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

You can list to the first part of our conversation here.

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Transcript:

Welcome back to Tell Us About It: Victim Research Convos, a podcast from the Center for Victim Research with support from the Office for Victims of Crime. On this episode of Tell Us About It, we’re continuing our conversation with Lisa Goodman and Ronit Barkai about their work developing the Community-Based Participatory Research Toolkit and the successes and challenges of its development.

Susan Howley: [00:10:33] Lisa, tell us about the CBPR tool kit. What was the impetus behind its development?

Lisa Goodman: [00:10:41] Well I have found over the years – and as I said I’ve been doing this research for decades – that there are plenty of universities or research settings where CBPR is still just not taught at all. So, there’s a lot of hunger to learn about it among emerging domestic violence researchers or even experienced ones that have not yet had the opportunity to try this kind of work. And that practitioners are also hungry for good research, although they are quite suspicious of researchers, so they too are interested in how CBPR actually works. So, to respond to these needs, it felt like both from the university and from practice, a few of us set out to do a very small project to create some resources for people who wanted to learn more about doing CBPR specifically in the DV context. And we were funded originally by a small grant from the WT Grant Foundation. But as we began to work, we realized that we really could not do this alone. We needed a broader network of people with more varied roles and identities to participate and we needed to really dive in more deeply into the nuances of CBPR because it’s really challenging work and we wanted to present it as it really is. And that meant we needed to do more. So luckily Anne Menard, who is the Chief Executive of the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence, agreed with us and that we needed to do more and really provided the resources for us to be able to expand to make a bigger toolkit. So, I feel very grateful to her and the final product represents a collaboration among quite a diverse array of people from different disciplines, from different professional settings, different communities, roles, identities. So, it was really a labor of love that involved an intense coordinating effort. In the end, we have a group of people who are primarily researchers, including psychologists and social workers and a pediatrician. We have people who represent several of the national culturally-specific resource centers who have their feet on the ground and are also researchers. And then we have practitioners as well.

Susan Howley: Lisa, I know the CBPR Toolkit was a team effort. Can you tell me about your teammates?

Lisa Goodman: Yes. Our final product represented a collaboration among quite a few people from different disciplines and professional settings and community roles and identities. So, first of all there was a group of researchers involved and the researchers were psychologists, social workers and a pediatrician. They included, besides me, Kristie Thomas, who was as a School of Social Work faculty at Simmons; Nkiru Nnawulezi, who is a Psychologist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Rebecca Macy, who is a University of North Carolina Social Work Faculty in North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Cris Sullivan, who is a Community Psychologist at Michigan State. And then Megan Bair-Merritt, who was a Pediatrician and Researcher at Boston Medical Center. So those were the researchers in universities. Then there were researchers from national culturally-specific resource centers, who have one leg in research and one leg in practice, and they included Josie Serrata, who at the time was at the National Latina Network for Healthy Families and Communities, which is a project of Casa de Esperanza. There was Carrie Lippy at the National LGBTQ institute on Intimate Partner Violence, and Susan Ghanbarpour, who was at the Asian Pacific Institute on Gender-Based Violence. And then beyond all those people, we had a bunch of people that we interviewed, who are part of the toolkit based on little video clips that we did of them. So, beyond the lead authors that I just named, we also have video clips based on interviews with Ronit Barkai from Transition House; Debra Heimel from REACH Beyond Domestic Violence; Deborah Collins-Gousby from Casa Myrna and she’s now at Brookview House. We had Amanda Stylianou, who’s from Safe Horizon in New York; and Shanti Kulkarni, who’s at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte at the School of Social Work. So it was quite a crew and quite a process to organize us into creating this toolkit. And I want to give a special shout out to Kristie Thomas, who was really in charge of organizing the video clip project, which was another huge event unto itself. So that was our team.

Susan Howley: [00:13:11] That’s wonderful. Great to have all of those perspectives so that you can be sure that the CBPR is really going to have the maximum reach and usefulness. What can people find in this toolkit? How does it help researchers enter into the world of CBPR?

Lisa Goodman: [00:13:32] Yeah. The toolkit. Well first of all the toolkit is available online at CBPRtoolkit.org and the whole thing is quite accessible. It’s got text and tons of video clips and personal anecdotes and some student first-person accounts of finding CBPR. It’s got exercises for readers to sort of consider whether they are ready to do CBPR and how they might get started. As I said, it’s all designed to go beyond the hype, to present a really nuanced picture of CBPR. And what is we wanted to present what is beautiful about it and also what is challenging about it and how experienced CBPR practitioners have managed some of these challenges.

Lisa Goodman: [00:14:20] So in terms of specific content, it’s organized into sections. So, the first big section explores the historical roots and current ways of thinking about CBPR generally and also then CBPR in the DV context specifically. Then there’s a second section that is one that really supports researchers and practitioners to do this prep work that I mentioned. It asks readers to consider questions like, what are your research goals? What is your identity and how is that linked to your research goals? What kinds of what kind of setting are you in? What do you think your blind spots might be? How have you tried to get to know survivors or programs or advocates? And it provides a range of strategies for getting to know a community, like entering into it with humility, how to build trust, how to ensure that the partnership is built on the right foundation. And then there’s a third section, which is really the meatiest section, which lays out a set of CBPR values and practices specifically as they relate to work with DV advocates and survivors in diverse communities. So it lists several different core CBPR values and then a set of strategies for achieving them in the particular context of domestic violence. This part includes tons of examples and practical resources and as the many people involved in this toolkit, we all brainstorm little anecdotes for each of these sections and they’re all included as well as some lessons learned.

Susan Howley: [00:16:23] Why was incorporating practitioners so important to this work? Ronit gave an example earlier about working with practitioners to make sure that the language was right and I assume that’s one of the examples. What are some other reasons that it’s so important to include – your primary focus is to educate researchers and bring them into this world. And so tell me about the importance of including practitioners as this toolkit was developed.

Lisa Goodman: [00:17:00] Yes, I think that that’s a very important question. And first of all we really did want to also include practitioners as audience because so many practitioners have learned about our work in Boston and have written to me and asked me the question: how do I know whether I can trust a researcher who wants to work with me or wants to collect data from our setting? What’s the litmus test? And so this toolkit was really written for practitioners as well as for researchers, like “This is what it looks like when people say they want to partner with you. Do they mean this or do they mean something else? Because if you want to be doing CBPR, this is what it should look like.” So it really was meant for practitioners as well. But you know I think the bottom line is that it would have been hypocritical for a bunch of academics to develop a toolkit on CBPR without partnering with those whose feet are more planted on the ground, who have deep knowledge and who are the very community members CBPR researchers should be partnering with. We wanted to kind of reflect a CBPR process even in the creation of the toolkit.

Susan Howley: [00:18:15] And Ronit, what was your experience in helping to develop the toolkit, from the practitioners perspective?

Ronit Barkai: [00:18:20] I mean from developing the toolkit to even being a member of the group and in forming research and being part of research that’s ongoing for me, it’s very important. I think for us, we feel many times that there are trends happening on the ground or real struggles happening on the ground that researchers will never know unless they really honestly and sincerely connect with us and with our clients. So you know you could sit in your office or you could sit in a classroom and teach domestic violence or explain domestic violence or research it. And I’ve been to conferences too where the things that are described are just not what is happening to our population, sometimes even dangerous things as still being sometimes that – maybe I shouldn’t even go into it – but I’ve heard different theories that in many ways even threaten the way that people will look at domestic violence and doubt the voices of our survivors. That will think that they are just as dangerous as their perpetrators and that domestic violence is maybe in one way or not the other. So for me, research has to feed, has to come and look at really the real picture. Otherwise there’s a real danger to research being disconnected from what’s happening. And if you don’t talk to practitioners, if you don’t talk to the actual survivors, you can form all kinds of theories that are not true and in some cases, we’re talking about people’s lives that could really feed even how laws are formed and courts rule and how police looks at domestic violence, how society looks at domestic violence, how the media does. Research has a lot of power and it scares us when people are coming out with theories and research that is disconnected and sometimes completely untrue from what’s happening on the ground. So for us to be part of this is essential and we’re really happy that we found this true partnership through, I call it DVPERC, but through the community-based research group.

Susan Howley: [00:20:26]  Have you all heard about the uptake of the CBPR toolkit? Are you hearing any stories about who’s using it and how?

Lisa Goodman: I do get emails periodically letting me know that people are using it in their classrooms or that someone – I actually got an email saying that she realized that CBPR is really not for her and thanks for saving her a great deal of time because, you know, I think, which was really one of my favorite emails because it really is not easy work. Although, I think it’s by far the most rewarding kind of research I’ve done. So I have gotten notice that people are using it in the academy and in decision-making. And I’ve heard less from practitioners about their use of it. So I don’t know. I think that, you know, I’m appreciative of this podcast because I think that the word has not really gotten out among practitioners quite as much that this is available to them.

Susan Howley: Looking forward a bit, what do you two see as the future of CBPR? Do you see this as a growing area or do you think that it’s sort of plateauing? What do you think would be the future? Lisa, we’ll start with you.

Lisa Goodman: Oh, I think it’s very clearly a growing area and the best evidence for that is the sort of expansion of funding opportunities for it. I think that people are realizing that in an era of scarce resources, we need to do research that is going to be applicable and that’s going to matter. So I see it as a real growing area. I also think that we have to work out some of the challenges that I’ve mentioned earlier. And I think that the biggest challenge that I just want to make clear – and we’re struggling with this in my own collaboration as well, Ronit and I have had many conversations about this – is how to include the broadest possible range of community members. So again, if we are talking about advocates, how to make sure that our CBPR partnerships our inclusive of advocates who represent perspectives that are not mainstream, specifically advocates who are themselves marginalized, who are in charge of what we call By and For Programs or culturally-specific programs, programs where the staff and the survivors sort of share a particular identity, a marginalized one. We need to really make sure that CBPR is prioritizing partnerships with those communities. And I think that we have a ways to go on that in that area. But I think overall there are opportunities and the opportunities are expanding.

Ronit Barkai: And I think the other thing is to keep questioning who’s not at the table. I mean, even us as practitioners, we need to look around and say who’s not at the table, whose voice is not here. And I think as long as we do that and we question things and really try and be inclusive and really don’t even stick to physically meeting in one place and try and be available in a variety of times and a variety of locations, then you give more access to other people. But I think it’s continuing to question who’s not at the table and also whose voice is not at the table.

Lisa Goodman: Yes. I want to give you an example of the complexity of this very question. We are now doing a study of our own DVPERC collaboration to ask the question: “Who is not at the table and why?” And so we have tried to do outreach to – our DVPERC is comprised of programs in the Boston area. There are a lot of them and there are quite a few that are still not at the table, even though there are 15 to 20 who are at the table. So we have gone out to do phone interviews or in-person interviews with programs that have not been able to make it to DVPERC or have come to earlier meetings and then stopped. And you know, many of these are culturally specific programs that we really want to be at the table. And what they have said to us are you need technology so that we can come without traveling and we would love to be part of this, but we want to make sure that you are going to be doing research in the – that’s translated into the eight or 10 languages that are survivors speak in this particular program. And then we are faced with the dilemma and I’m just going to be really honest with you, with the dilemma of wanting to center the most marginalized voices like those, those survivors speaking the eight or 10 different languages and having no, you know, struggling to find the funding to do that sort of translation since much of our work, all of the work that is done primarily by students and supervised by us is done without any funding at all. So we are working to try to find creative ways to highlight and lift up and center the research questions that some of these more marginalized programs have, while also working with, you know, sort of tiny or nonexistent budgets.

Ronit Barkai: I want to come back to the point around language that Lisa just spoke about. I think it’s so important because many times if I’m thinking of those drive-by experiences, most of the time the research came in English. So then I don’t have the resources and that’s not really up to me as a practitioner to translate the questions that came in through that envelope in the mail, in order for other people with other languages to have voice. So in many ways they never had a voice in these drive-by experiences. So then the data that came back to these researchers does not include them. And in therefore, in many ways, from what I’m seeing, it is skewed and not true, it doesn’t show the reality on the ground. Having these conversations that we’re having around language, dedicating time and resources to making sure that our clients will, no matter what language they have, can give voice. It’s really, really important to us because a large amount of the victims we serve right now or survivors, whatever language we use it and how we call them, they speak other languages. They come from other cultures and if we don’t ask them, we’re not getting the true picture of what’s happening.

Lisa Goodman: And just to bring us back to the Toolkit, I will say that this little conversation we’ve had about language right here is an example of the nuance of doing CBPR that is represented in the Toolkit. This is the real on-the-ground, nitty gritty stuff. How do you lift up marginalized voices without, you know, using multiple translations of whatever you’re doing would be a perfect example of the kind of complexity that we deal with in the Toolkit.

Susan Howley:  This has been so informative. I’ve learned so much about CBPR. Are there any parting thoughts you want to leave our listeners, especially about the Toolkit and ways that they can take baby steps into this area?

Lisa Goodman: Well, I just want to reiterate that we are at a moment in our history where DV programs’ very survival depends on research and evaluation. You know, DV programs really need to be demonstrating the effectiveness of what they do to survive. So organizations need to collaborate with researchers, but more importantly, researchers need to be collaborating with programs, with survivors and advocates. Because as survivors’ needs and life stories become evermore complex, researchers are further removed from the real life nitty gritty experience of what it is to be a survivor or what it is to be an advocate doing their best to work with survivors with limited resources. And so I think more than ever, researchers need to be listening hard to community members, just as community members need to be working with researchers. So I really hope that our Toolkit can be a source of inspiration and support and sort of a path forward for people who hear that call and are interested in it, but don’t know where to go or what to do. I hope that it can really sort of be – kind of take, take the new researcher or experienced researcher interested in this kind of work by the hand and take them the next step in this journey.

Ronit Barkai: For me, I think Lisa touched on a few things. We as domestic violence agencies right now and as practitioners are asked by our – when we apply for grants, when we apply for funding, everyone wants to hear about our outcomes. This is not the work that existed 40 and 30 years ago, where we were just on the ground putting out fires. In many ways, we rely on data to show our efficacy and otherwise will not be funded. So this is about our survival and about us being able to continue to have our doors open. And I think my message to practitioners, if they are listening to this, is to say to not be afraid of forming relationships with researchers and that it is essential that we do. Because it is very dangerous when researchers are working in isolation and are coming out with theories as for example, the gender symmetry theory, that can be really dangerous and can change the way that people perceive and look at domestic violence. So I think it is our duty to be part of this because people need to hear the voice of our work and of the people we serve. I think it’s just something that we all need to find time to do, although in many ways it’s so difficult to sort of leave your work and feed data and to sort of collaborate. But it’s something I think we all need to pay attention to.

Susan Howley: Well I want to thank you both so much for sharing your work with us today. I think that so many of the listeners and myself are good to go straight to the Toolkit online and start looking around and digging in. So, thank you.

Lisa Goodman: Thank you so much for this opportunity. I hope you all will take a look and email me and let me know what you think.

Ronit Barkai: Yeah, thank you so much for inviting me to be part of this.