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Measuring violence using administrative data collected by specialist domestic and sexual violence and abuse support services

    Interpersonal violence, which can include various forms of domestic and sexual violence and abuse (DSVA) is a leading cause of death, particularly among young adults. In the UK, specialist DSVA services provide much-needed support to victim-survivors of these types of violence, and some provide support for perpetrators to change their behaviour. To monitor and support their work, specialist services collect data on violence. This data has the potential to improve understanding of violence but presents unique challenges.

    In this review, VISION researchers Dr Annie Bunce, Dr Sophie Carlisle and Dr Estela Capelas Barbosa describe and discuss some of the key challenges facing the data collected by specialist services.

    Inconsistencies in data collection arise due to the differing remits and priorities of specialist services, which mean violence and abuse are defined and measured in slightly different ways by these organisations. Particularly, the review highlights the significant variation in outcomes and outcome measurement tools used to evidence the effectiveness of services and interventions.

    Specialist support services collect valuable data on many and multiple types of violence, the wide impacts of violence on victim-survivors’ lives, and information about perpetrators. As the data are not collected for research purposes, a considerable amount of work is often required to make the data suitable for statistical analysis. Critically, the piecemeal and insecure funding of specialist services limits their capacity to collect and analyse data.

    Together these issues make it challenging to collate data from specialist services and use it to inform measurements of violence. 

    The researchers recommend the development of a core outcomes framework, exploration of methods for linking specialist services data with other sources of administrative data on violence, and sustainable funding for third sector specialist support services.

    For further information please see: Social Sciences | Free Full-Text | The Concept and Measurement of Interpersonal Violence in Specialist Services Data: Inconsistencies, Outcomes and the Challenges of Synthesising Evidence (mdpi.com)

    Or contact Dr Annie Bunce at annie.bunce@city.ac.uk

    Photograph by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

    Varying definitions and measurements of violence limit reduction strategies

      Violence reduction is a United Nations (UN) sustainable development goal (SDG) and is important to both the public health and criminology fields. The collaboration between the two has the potential to create and improve prevention strategies but has been hampered by the usage of different definitions and measurements.

      In this paper, VISION researchers Dr Niels Blom, Dr Anastasia Fadeeva and Dr Estela Capelas Barbosa explore the definitions and measurements of violence by the World Health Organization, UN, and Council of Europe to arrive at a harmonized framework aligned with the SDGs.

      Violence and abuse are defined by these organizations as intentional actions that (are likely to) lead to harm, irrespective of physicality or legality. When recording violence and abuse, health- and justice-based administrative systems use different codes which cannot directly be translated without resorting to broad overarching categories.

      The researchers propose a framework to record violence that includes individual and event identifiers, forms of violence and abuse (including physical, sexual, and psychological), harm, and individual and event characteristics.

      For further information please see: Social Sciences | Free Full-Text | The Concept and Measurement of Violence and Abuse in Health and Justice Fields: Toward a Framework Aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (mdpi.com)

      Or contact Niels at Niels.Blom@city.ac.uk

      Photo by Parsa on Unsplash

      Unlocking violence information from clinical text

        Blog by Dr Lifang Li, Research Associate with UKPRP VISION, Kings College London

        Clinical Record Interactive Search (CRIS)

        In 2008, the Clinical Record Interactive Search (CRIS) system was launched. CRIS removes personal identifiers from the health records of the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust, making them available for use in mental health research. The platform operates under a governance framework that prioritises patient anonymity and places patients at the centre of its operations. The use of exceptionally large volumes of records with unprecedented levels of detail has the potential to revolutionise mental health research. 

        The CRIS Violence application

        The CRIS violence application is computer software that finds clinical text that refers to interpersonal violence, including the presence of violence, patient status (i.e. as perpetrator, witness or victim of violence) and violence type (domestic, physical and/or sexual) using Natural Language Processing (NLP). NLP uses pattern matching and statistical techniques to automatically process natural human language. It was developed by Riley Botelle, Professor Robert Stewart and their colleagues to the identification and classification of experiences of violence in narrative records, described in their 2022 paper “Can natural language processing models extract and classify instances of interpersonal violence in mental healthcare electronic records: an applied evaluative study”. Recently, after a thorough validation process, the CRIS team has started to run the violence application routinely, alongside many other NLP applications (e.g., to find suicidality, agitation, medications, anxiety) that are available for CRIS. Structured output from these, now including various violence-related variables, is saved back into the CRIS database, from where authorised health researchers can access it.  

        How does it serve the researchers and clinicians?

        By accurately identifying the presence of violence, different types of violence, and patient status, the application is enabling researchers to examine how experiences of violence are correlated with various mental health problems, outcomes and treatment trajectories, and how these relate to patients’ characteristics (such and age, gender, and ethnic group), and account for health inequalities.

        Future work

        Given the possibility that psychological abuse and economic abuse may also occur in patients and are recorded in the health record by clinicians, our work as part of the VISION consortium involves updating the current violence application to identify mentions of these, allowing us to extend the violence research possible using CRIS.

        Illustration: Nina Rys / Shutterstock.com

        Mental health and wellbeing data – webinar for researchers

          This webinar focused on quantitative analysis of secondary data, to provide insight into population mental health and its social determinants. It took place on Teams Monday, 6 March 2023, at 14:00-15:30.

          Speakers included VISION researcher Sally McManus, who discussed England’s main mental health survey, the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey (APMS). The survey series covers anxiety and depression, alongside items on violence and abuse.

          This webinar formed part of a series organised by Understanding Society, UK Data Service, Centre for Longitudinal Studies (CLS) and the National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM). The Data Resource Training Network is a collaboration between a number of ESRC-funded resource centres working together to promote the value and use of social science data.

          Photo credit: Photo by Erol Ahmed on Unsplash