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Helping battered women: A study of the relationship between nurses' education and experience and their preferred models of helping
Abstract
The battering and abuse of women is a problem which adversely affects the health of millions of women in the United States. Nurses are in a particularly strategic position to identify and provide helpful interventions for women who come in contact with the health care establishment. The feminist literature argues for helping strategies which do not blame women for their abuse and which attempt to empower women to take control of their own lives. However, often the past educational preparation of the nurse has not included content on battering, leaving them unprepared to assess for abuse or to provide intervention aimed at fostering independence and personal empowerment. The purpose of this study was to determine the perceived model of helping preferred by nurses in their interventions with battered women and to determine those factors in the nurses' educational experiences and clinical practice which affect their preference for a specific helping model. Data was obtained from 116 registered nurses, 57 nurses practiced in the emergency department setting, and 59 nurses had attended a three day national nursing conference on violence against women. The data of this study were collected through self-administered questionnaires: the Education/Experience Questionnaire and the Help Orientation Test. The results of this study indicate that the medical model of helping, in which the client is attributed low responsibility for both problem cause and solution, not a particularly empowering model but one tending to foster dependency, is characteristic of the helping orientation of all nurses in the study sample. This is true regardless of practice setting, or whether or not nurses have acquired specific knowledge on the topic of battering. All nurses reported significant clinical and personal contact with battered women but few reported having acquired specific education on battering. It was found that nurses who had acquired specific knowledge on battering did perceive themselves as knowledgeable and well prepared in their practice with battered women. This research pointed to the relevance of the type of education about woman abuse which is necessary to permit nurses to not just help battered women but to help in such a way as to foster independence.
Subject Area
Nursing|Health education
Recommended Citation
King, Mary C, "Helping battered women: A study of the relationship between nurses' education and experience and their preferred models of helping" (1988). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI8813247.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI8813247