RT Article
T1 “I Have to Fight to Get Out”: African American Women Intimate Partner Violence Survivors’ Construction of Agency
JF Journal of interpersonal violence
VO 38
IS 3/4
SP 4166
OP 4188
A1 Waller, Bernadine Y.
A1 Bent-Goodley, Tricia B.
A2 Bent-Goodley, Tricia B.
LA English
YR 2023
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1832641228
AB African American women survivors of intimate partner violence are disproportionately murdered and help-seeking is a critical variable to examine as it relates to it. There is an urgent need to develop culturally salient interventions that center African American women’s ways of knowing. An initial step to doing so is identifying how they employ their sense of individual agency during help-seeking. This paper reflects findings from a study designed to do just that. We conducted 30 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with women who self-identified as African American. Constructivist grounded theory methodology was employed. Constructed agency emerged from the data. This nascent theory explicates four phases of African American women survivors’ help-seeking: resistance, persistence, rejection, and resignation. Constructed agency provides practitioners and researchers with a theoretical model to examine African American women’s nuanced help-seeking efforts when seeking informal supports and interventions from formal providers.
K1 intervention/treatment
K1 disclosure of domestic violence
K1 Battered Women
K1 Homicide
K1 domestic violence and cultural contexts
DO 10.1177/08862605221113008