Domestic Violence Screening: Why the Rush to Dismiss It?

Karen Roush, MS, RN, FNP-C, AJN clinical managing editor

All rights reserved. Photos by author.

A recent study reported in JAMA, “The Effect of Screening for Partner Violence on Women’s Quality of Life” (abstract only), is being touted in overly simplistic headlines across the Web (the word “debunks” has been getting a lot of use) as further evidence that domestic violence screening doesn’t improve outcomes for women.

Don’t believe it.

The problem doesn’t lie with the researchers or with JAMA; they accurately reported just what they found. The problem lies with how it is being interpreted by others as further proof of the overall ineffectiveness of screening for intimate partner violence (IPV).

What the study actually found was that there was no difference in health outcomes between women who received computerized screening and a resource list and women who just received the resource list or women who received neither.

This is how it worked:

Women in primary care settings who agreed to participate and who were randomized to the screening group were seated in front of a computer and responded to the three questions in the partner violence screening (for example, “have you ever been hit, kicked, punched or otherwise hurt by someone within the past year?”) […]

Medical Research–You Get What You Pay For

But someone is paying for the production of the content on the Internet—if it’s not a reputable organization or journal, who is it? Is it unbiased? Is it evidence-based, and who vetted the evidence and the authors? Let the readers—and their patients—be wary of what they read online and ask themselves just who paid for it, and why.

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