The specific goals of this project were (1) to assess the selection criteria used to determine the domestic violence cases for intensive intervention: what criteria are used, and what differentiates how cases are handled, (2) to track the outcomes through Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department (CMPD), Mecklenburg domestic violence court, and the Mecklenburg jail for the different methods of dealing with the cases, and (3) to provide an assessment of the relative effectiveness of a specialized domestic violence unit vis-a-vis normal patrol unit responses in terms of repeat calls, court processing, victim harm, and repeat arrests. The population from which the sample was selected consisted of all police complaint numbers for cases involving domestic violence (DV) in 2003. The unit of analysis was therefore the domestic violence incident. Cases were selected using a randomized stratified sample (stratifying by month) that also triple-sampled DV Unit cases, which generated 255 DV Unit cases for inclusion. The final sample therefore consists of 891 domestic violence cases, each involving one victim and one suspect. Within this final sample of cases, 25 percent were processed by the DV Unit. The data file contains data from multiple sources. Included from the police department's computerized database (KBCOPS) are variables pertaining to the nature of the crime, victim information and suspect information such as suspect and victim demographic data, victim/offender relationship, highest offense category, weapon usage, victim injury, and case disposition status. From police narratives come such variables as victim/offender relationship, weapon use (more refined than what is included in KBCOPS data), victim injury (also a more refined measure), and evidence collected. Variables from tracking data include information regarding the nature of the offense, the level/type of harm inflicted, and if the assault involved the same victim in the sample. Variables such as amount of jail time a suspect may have had, information pertaining to the court charges (as opposed to the charges at arrest) and case disposition status are included from court and jail data.

This study was designed to explore whether civil protection orders were effective in providing safer environments for victims of domestic violence and enhancing their opportunities for escaping violent relationships. The researchers looked at the factors that might influence civil protection orders, such as accessibility to the court process, linkages to public and private services and sources of support, and the criminal record of the victim's abuser, and then examined how courts in three jurisdictions processed civil protection orders. Wilmington, Delaware, Denver, Colorado, and the District of Columbia were chosen as sites because of structural differences among them that were believed to be linked to the effectiveness of civil protection orders. Since these jurisdictions each had different court processes and service models, the researchers expected that these models would produce various results and that these variations might hold implications for improving practices in other jurisdictions. Data were collected through initial and follow-up interviews with women who had filed civil protection orders. The effectiveness of the civil protection orders was measured by the amount of improvement in the quality of the women's lives after the order was in place, versus the extent of problems created by the protection orders. Variables from the survey of women include police involvement at the incident leading to the protection order, the relationship of the petitioner and respondent to the petition prior to the order, history of abuse, the provisions asked for and granted in the order, if a permanent order was not filed for by the petitioner, the reasons why, the court experience, protective measures the petitioner undertook after the order, and how the petitioner's life changed after the order. Case file data were gathered on when the order was filed and issued, contempt motions and hearings, stipulations of the order, and social service referrals. Data on the arrest and conviction history of the petition respondent were also collected.

This longitudinal mixed-methods study examined to what extent female intimate partner violence (IPV) victim participation in prosecution was associated with their future safety. The study followed a cohort of female IPV victims with cases the police presented to the prosecutor, in the year 2000, in a single Midwestern United States county (Kalamazoo County, Michigan) for a four-year period (1999-2002) across multiple systems (police, prosecutor, criminal court, civil court, hospital Emergency Departments) to assess the victim's experience with participation in IPV prosecution and her associated future help seeking, health and safety. Since this study utilized retrospective administrative data, subsequent IPV was defined as a future documented IPV-related police incident or an Emergency Department visit for IPV or injury. The data abstraction and analysis of the administrative data was informed by focus groups with survivors, advocates, and medical and criminal justice service providers, along with in-depth qualitative analysis of a stratified random sample of individual IPV cases. The final analytic dataset created by the research team integrated two types of data: (1) in-depth data about the index assault case and characteristics of the couple involved, and (2) longitudinal data about prior and subsequent IPV events spanning multiple systems: police, prosecutor, emergency department, and family court protection orders.

The Judicial Oversight Demonstration (JOD) was designed to test the feasibility and impact of a coordinated response to intimate partner violence (IPV) that involved the courts and justice agencies in a central role. The primary goals were to protect victim safety, hold offenders accountable, and reduce repeat offending. The two primary evaluation objectives were: (1) to test the impact of JOD interventions on victim safety, offender accountability, and recidivism, and (2) to learn from the experiences of well-qualified sites who were given resources and challenged to build a collaboration between the courts and community agencies to respond to intimate partner violence. Dorchester, Massachusetts, and Washtenaw County, Michigan, participated in a quasi-experimental evaluation of the impact of the program. IPV cases reaching disposition during the JOD were compared to similar cases reaching disposition in Lowell, Massachusetts, and Ingham County, Michigan. All IPV cases reaching disposition from approximately January 2003 to November 2004 (see Study Time Periods and Time Frames) were reviewed and included in the sample if appropriate. To be eligible for the sample, cases had to involve: (1) criminal IPV charges; (2) victims and offenders age 18 or older; and (3) victims and offenders who lived in the target jurisdiction at the time of case disposition. Cases that reached disposition more than a year after the incident were excluded to limit loss of data due to poor recall of the facts of the incident and police response. The evaluation design of JOD in Milwaukee differed from that of the other two sites. The evaluation in Milwaukee was based on a quasi-experimental comparison of offenders convicted of IPV and ordered to probation during JOD (January 1, 2001, to May 21, 2002) and before JOD (October 8, 1997, to December 21, 1999). This design was selected when early plans for an experimental design had to be abandoned and no comparable contemporaneous comparison group could be identified. Data for this evaluation were collected from court and prosecutors' records of case and defendant characteristics, probation files on offender supervision practices, and official records of rearrest, but do not include interviews with victims or offenders. This data collection has 20 data files containing 3,578 cases and 4,092 variables. The data files contain information related to each site's Batterer Intervention Programs (Parts 1, 8, and 15), court data (Parts 2, 12, 13, 14, 16, and 18), law enforcement (Parts 3, 11, and 17), and victim data (Parts 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, and 19). The Dorchester, Massachusetts, and Washtenaw County, Michigan, Impact Evaluation Data (Part 7) include baseline and follow-up information for the offender and the victim. The data file also contains Probation Supervision Performance Reports, Victim Services Logs, and Case Incident Fact Sheet information. The Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Impact Evaluation Data (Part 20) include information related to the offender and the victim such as age, race, and sex, as well as arrest records including charges filed.

The purpose of this research was to improve understanding of the conditions under which criminal sanctions do and do not reduce repeat violence between intimate partners. This study involved repeated reading and close inspection of four documents in order to compare and contrast the multivariate analyses reported by John Wooldredge and Amy Thistlethwaite (RECONSIDERING DOMESTIC VIOLENCE RECIDIVISM: INDIVIDUAL AND CONTEXTUAL EFFECTS OF COURT DISPOSITIONS AND STAKE IN CONFORMITY IN HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO, 1993-1998 [ICPSR 3013]). The first part of this study's design involved the detailed literature review of four Wooldredge and Thistlethwaite publications between the years 1999 and 2005. The second element of the study's design required researchers to gain a detailed understanding of the archived data using the documentation provided by Wooldredge. The third element of the study's secondary analysis research design involved using the identified variables to reproduce the multivariate empirical findings about the effects of sanctions, stakes, and social context on repeat offending. These findings were presented in a series of tables in the four Wooldredge and Thistlethwaite publications. After numerous iterations of reading reports and documentation and exploring alternative measures and methods, researchers produced a report detailing their ability to reproduce Wooldredge and Thistlethwaite's descriptive measures. This study's design called for using explicit criteria for determining the extent to which Wooldredge and Thistlethwaite's findings could be reproduced. Researchers developed and applied three criteria for making that determination. The first was a simple comparison of the regression coefficients and standard errors. The second criterion was a determination of whether the reproduced results conformed to the direction and statistical significance levels of the original analyses. The third criterion was to apply a statistical test to assess the significance of any differences in the sizes of the original and the reproduced coefficients. The data archived by Wooldredge provided seven dichotomous measures of criminal sanctions (no charges filed, dismissed, acquitted, a treatment program, probation only, jail only, and a combination of probation and jail). Part of the design of this study was to go beyond reproducing Wooldredge and Thistlethwaite's approaches and to reformulate the available measures of criminal sanctions to more directly test the prosecution, conviction, and sentence severity hypotheses. The researchers produced these tests by constructing three new measures of criminal sanctions (prosecution, conviction, and sanction severity) and testing each of them in separate multivariate models. The Part 1 (Hamilton County, Ohio, Census Tract Data) data file contains 206 cases and 35 variables. The Part 2 (Neighborhood Data) data file contains 47 cases and 12 variables. The variables in Part 1 (Hamilton County, Ohio, Census Tract Data) include a census tract indicator, median household income of tract, several proportions such as number of college graduates in the tract and corresponding Z-scores, a regression factor score for analysis 1, a socio-economic factor, a census tract number for the city of Cincinnati, Ohio, and a Cincinnati neighborhoods indicator. Variables in Part 2 (Neighborhood Data) include a neighborhood indicator, average age in the neighborhood, demographic proportions such as proportion male in the neighborhood and proportion of college graduates in the neighborhood, and a social class factor.

This study examined the impacts of jurisdictions' domestic violence policies on violent behavior of family members and intimate partners, on the likelihood that the police discovered an incident, and on the likelihood that the police made an arrest. The research combined two datasets. Part 1 contains information on police, prosecution policies, and local victim services. Informants within the local agencies of the 50 largest cities in the United States were contacted and asked to complete a survey inventorying policies and activities by type and year of implementation. Data from completed surveys covered 48 cities from 1976 to 1996. Part 2 contains data on domestic violence laws. Data on state statutes from 1976 to 1997 that related to protection orders were collected by a legal expert for all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

This study was an outcome evaluation of the effects of the Duluth Domestic Abuse Intervention Project Training Model for Law Enforcement Response on police officer attitudes toward domestic violence. Data on the effectiveness of the training were collected by means of an attitude survey of law enforcement officers (Part 1). Additionally, two experimental designs (Part 2) were implemented to test the effects of the Duluth model training on (1) time spent by police officers at the scene of a domestic violence incident, and (2) the number of convictions. Variables for Part 1 include the assigned research group and respondents' level of agreement with various statements, such as: alcohol is the primary cause of family violence, men are more likely than women to be aggressive, only mentally ill people batter their families, mandatory arrest of offenders is the best way to reduce repeat episodes of violence, family violence is a private matter, law enforcement policies are ineffective for preventing family violence, children of single-parent, female-headed families are abused more than children of dual-parent households, and prosecution of an offender is unlikely regardless of how well a victim cooperates. Index scores calculated from groupings of various variables are included as well as whether the respondent found training interesting, relevant, well-organized, and useful. Demographic variables for each respondent include race, gender, age, and assignment and position in the police department. Variables for Part 2 include whether the domestic violence case occurred before or after training, to which test group the case belongs, the amount of time in minutes spent on the domestic violence scene, and whether the case resulted in a conviction.

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.

The goal of this study was to identify factors that influence whether city misdemeanor domestic violence cases in which batterers are arrested by police result in dismissals, acquittals, or convictions in the courts, and how these cases are processed. The researchers sought to examine factors that influence court officials' decision-making in domestic violence cases, as well as factors that influence victim and witness reluctance in bringing batterers to successful adjudication. In Part 1 researchers merged pretrial services data with information from police and prosecutors' reports in the urban area under study to answer the following questions: (1) What is the rate of dismissals, acquittals, and convictions for misdemeanor court cases and what are the conditions of these sentences? (2) What factors in court cases are significantly related to whether the disposition is a dismissal, acquittal, or conviction, and how are these cases processed? In Part 2, judges, prosecutors, and public defenders were asked detailed questions about their level of knowledge about, attitudes toward, and self-reported behaviors regarding the processing of domestic violence cases to find out: (1) What roles do legal and extra-legal factors play in decision-makers' self-reported behaviors and attitudes? (2) How do decision-makers rate victim advocate and batterer treatment programs? (3) How do court professionals view the victim's role in the court process? and (4) To what degree do court professionals report victim-blaming attitudes and experiences? For Part 3 researchers used a stratified random sample to select court cases of misdemeanor domestic violence that would be transcribed and used for a content analysis to examine: (1) Who speaks in court and how? and (2) What is considered relevant by different court players? In Parts 4-103 victim surveys and interviews were administered to learn about battered women's experiences in both their personal lives and the criminal processing system. Researchers sought to answer the following questions: (1) How do victim/witnesses perceive their role in the prosecution of their abusers? (2) What factors inhibit them from pursuing prosecution? (3) What factors might help them pursue prosecution? and (4) How consistent are the victims'/witnesses' demographic and psychological profiles with existing research in this area? Domestic violence victims attending arraignment between January 1 and December 31 of 1997 were asked to complete surveys to identify their concerns about testifying against their partners and to evaluate the effectiveness of the court system in dealing with domestic violence cases (Part 4). The disposition of each case was subsequently determined by a research team member's examination of defendants' case files and/or court computer files. Upon case closure victims who had both completed a survey and indicated a willingness to be interviewed were contacted to participate in an interview (Parts 5-103). Variables in Part 1, Pretrial Services Data, include prior criminal history, current charges, case disposition, sentence, victim testimony, police testimony, victim's demeanor at trial, judge's conduct, type of abuse involved, weapons used, injuries sustained, and type of evidence available for trial. Demographic variables include age, sex, and race of defendants, victims, prosecutors, and judges. In Part 2, Professional Survey Data, respondents were asked about their tolerance for victims and offenders who appeared in court more than once, actions taken when substance abuse was involved, the importance of injuries in making a decision, attitudes toward battered women, the role of victim advocates and the police, views on restraining orders, and opinion on whether arrest is a deterrent. Demographic variables include age, sex, race, marital status, and years of professional experience. Variables in Part 3, Court Transcript Data, include number and type of charges, pleas, reasons for dismissals,

This study focused on the actuarial and situational correlates of domestic violence and the variables that differentiate those who batter their partners from those who are "generally" violent. The study defined violence as physical violence and excluded both psychological abuse and verbal threats. Domestic violence was defined as a man battering his spouse or partner, while extradomestic violence referred to the batterer's involvement in violence outside the home, as reported by the victim of the domestic incident. The data are victim reports concerning batterers collected through face-to-face interviews with 270 former clients of Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA)-funded family violence programs conducted approximately three months following final contact with the program. The data include demographic variables on both the LEAA-funded program client and her partner, variables detailing the partner's domestic and extradomestic violence, and variables on any services received by the client.