| Summary: | This study sought to answer the question: If a woman is experiencing intimate partner violence, does the collective efficacy and community capacity of her neighborhood facilitate or erect barriers to her ability to escape violence, other things being equal? To address this question, longitudinal data on a sample of 210 abused women from the CHICAGO WOMEN'S HEALTH RISK STUDY, 1995-1998 (ICPSR 3002) were combined with community context data for each woman's residential neighborhood taken from the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS) evaluation, LONGITUDINAL EVALUATION OF CHICAGO'S COMMUNITY POLICING PROGRAM, 1993-2000 (ICPSR 3335). The unit of analysis for the study is the individual abused woman (not the neighborhood). The study takes the point of view of a woman standing at a street address and looking around her. The characteristics of the small geographical area immediately surrounding her residential address form the community context for that woman. Researchers chose the police beat as the best definition of a woman's neighborhood, because it is the smallest Chicago area for which reliable and complete data are available. The characteristics of the woman's police beat then became the community context for each woman. The beat, district, and community area of the woman's address are present. Neighborhood-level variables include voter turnout percentage, organizational involvement, percentage of households on public aid, percentage of housing that was vacant, percentage of housing units owned, percentage of feminine poverty households, assault rate, and drug crime rate. Individual-level demographic variables include the race, ethnicity, age, marital status, income, and level of education of the woman and the abuser. Other individual-level variables include the Social Support Network (SSN) scale, language the interview was conducted in, Harass score, Power and Control score, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) diagnosis, other data pertaining to the respondent's emotional and physical health, and changes over the past year. Also included are details about the woman's household, such as whether she was homeless, the number of people living in the household and details about each person, the number of her children or other children in the household, details of any of her children not living in her household, and any changes in the household structure over the past year. Help-seeking in the past year includes whether the woman had sought medical care, had contacted the police, or had sought help from an agency or counselor, and whether she had an order of protection. Several variables reflect whether the woman left or tried to leave the relationship in the past year. Finally, the dataset includes summary variables about violent incidents in the past year (severity, recency, and frequency), and in the follow-up period.
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