Constructing Women Who Experience Male Violence: Criminal Legal Discourse and Individual Experiences

This article examines the relationship between how women who experience violence from a male partner construct themselves, and how criminal legal discourse constructs female victims of violence. It is argued that in both arenas, women are constructed according to norms which emanate from a discourse of conventional femininity which operates together with a practice of shame. Utilising empirical data gained from qualitative interviews with women who experienced male violence, the article contends that the construction of the female victim of violence in criminal legal discourses as imbued with stereotypical ‘feminine’ characteristics such as passivity and weakness, may influence these women’s own construction and understanding of themselves. The existence of a practice of shame further consolidates the self-regulation of the women themselves to these norms of femininity. This construction is posited to be problematic as the experiences of women of male violence rarely ‘fit’ within these explanations. The article contends that in order to better understand women’s experiences of male violence; both criminal legal and individual women’s discourses need to be read in terms of the power, knowledge and effects which they exert upon individual women. It is argued that this alternative reading of these discourses has the potential for transformation as they are invested in the subject.

The Human Rights Review Tribunal and the rights of health and disability consumers in New Zealand

In New Zealand where there is a statutory bar on the right to sue for compensatory damages arising out of personal injury, and therefore injury arising out of negligent health care, the Human Rights Review Tribunal, in certain circumstances, provides relief for people who are aggrieved by the care they have received from a provider of a health or disability service. That relief may range from a declaration that the provider has breached the Code of Health and Disability Services Consumers' Rights to awards of compensatory and exemplary damages. The article explores the use of this tribunal by the Director of Proceedings of the Office of the Health and Disability Commissioner in holding providers of health and disability services accountable and obtaining relief for consumers and their families.     

Critical Factors for Enhancing Municipal Public Hearings

Although public hearings are the most common form of citizen input, they often fail to achieve their objectives. This nationwide survey of city administrators identifies factors that contribute most to successful public hearings. The most successful hearings have (1) a greater number of prehearing educational methods, (2) more media types and greater media frequency in the formal presentation, (3) more control over speakers' presentation time, (4) greater use of open follow-up meetings, and (5) more use of newspaper and direct mail to communicate posthearing decisions to the public. The qualitative data reveal city managers' 10 critical factors that are essential to the success of public hearings: effectively notifying and educating the public before the hearing; carefully planning the meeting; giving a clear, media-rich presentation of the issues; properly facilitating the meeting; and conducting appropriate follow-up.     

A “second look” at interviews with adolescents

Interviews are widely used in adolescent study as data collection methods. This article argues that such interviews contain an additional order of data, located in the conversing, which can complement the content analysis and interpretation of answers to questions. This argument is based on treating interviews with adolescents as actual instances of adolescent adult interaction and is illustrated by transcribed passages from a series of interviews with young adolescents. The purpose of the study is to outline how researchers using an interview method can examine records of the talk for valuable supplementary data. The conversational analysis sketched here is, of course, only one possible way of taking this second look. In this area, it would also be a valuable resource for investigators to study how adolescents manage their research participation under a variety of data collection methods. Adequately recorded interviews contain such data, and can be inspected for the presence or clues to the very phenomena researchers may be interested in. All of this requires the understanding that 1) the primary order of empirical data is the talking and, 2) the interviews are instances of adolescent behavior.     

Are Shelter Workers Burned Out?: An Examination of Stress,Social Support,and Coping

Job stress, perceived social support, coping self-efficacy, and coping strategies were studied as predictors of emotional exhaustion and reduced personal accomplishment among a sample of 123 female shelter workers. Overall, these workers did not meet the collective criteria for burnout as defined by Maslach and Jackson (1986) and perceived social support and coping strategies did not account for unique variance in the prediction of emotional exhaustion and reduced personal accomplishment. Rather, high levels of time pressure and low levels of self-efficacy for being productive at work were identified as predictors of emotional exhaustion. Personal accomplishment was predicted by time pressure and robust levels of self-efficacy for dealing with stressors at work. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 109th annual convention of the American Psychological Association. This paper is based on the Masters thesis of Lisa M. Baker and the undergraduate honors thesis of Nazish Salahuddin, both completed under the direction of Karen M. O’Brien. Gratitude is extended to Christel Nichols and to the crisis workers who participated in this study.