Victoria Lavis

Domestic Violence and Health Care: Opening Pandora’s Box - Challenges and Dilemmas

In this article we take a critical stance toward the rational progressive narrative surrounding the integration of domestic violence within health care. While changes in recent UK policy and practice have resulted in several tangible benefits, it is argued that there may be hidden dilemmas and challenges. We suggest that the medical model of care and its discursive practices position women as individually accountable for domestic violence-related symptoms and injuries. This may not only be ineffective in terms of service provision but could also have the potential to reduce the political significance of domestic violence as an issue of concern for all women. Furthermore, it is argued that the use of specific metaphors enables practitioners to distance themselves from interactions that may prove to be less comfortable and provide less than certain outcomes. Our analysis explores the possibilities for change that might currently be available. This would appear to involve a consideration of alternative discourses and the reformulation of power relations and subject positions in health care.

Multiple Researcher Identities: Highlighting Tensions and Implications for Ethical Practice in Qualitative Interviewing

Drawing on Coffeys (1991) notion of fieldwork as ‘identity work,’ this article explores the implications of constructing and performing multiple ‘researcher identities’ within qualitative research interviewing. In doing so it utilises three examples taken from social psychological research which employed a discursive approach, informed by feminist research principles, to explore issues of power, knowledge, and language on the interaction between primary health care services and women experiencing domestic violence. These examples illustrate how within qualitative in-depth interviews identities can be both constructed by (Wolf 1996) and required of the researcher by their participants (Thapar-Björkert & Henry 2004). While such researcher identities can be viewed, particularly within research informed by feminist ethics, as a form of ‘integrity’; being responsive to the individual needs of specific participants, they also can leave the researcher with the experience of feeling disingenous. The article explores some of the tensions inherent within these two vantage-points and calls for a wider engagement and discussion of these issues in order to enable researchers to better negotiate such tensions.