Challenges and strategies in using technology to help serve violence survivors within Community-Based Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Agencies

As electronic technology to collect, store, manage and analyze data becomes ubiquitous, community-based domestic violence (DV) and sexual assault (SA) programs need effective tools to manage data in a meaningful way. In collaboration with key partners throughout the state of North Carolina (NC), our team developed The Health and Safety Module, a set of standardized assessment instruments and protocols that enable service providers to collected meaningful data from survivors upon service entry to help inform service planning at the end of services to enable outcome information. We have been transitioning the Health and Safety Module from a paper-pencil interview into a statewide NC Data System used by NC DV/SA programs so that information can be stored and analyzed electronically.

From this collaborative, practice-research partnership our team has garnered information regarding many data management strategies that are acceptable, feasible for grassroots DV/SA programs. In this presentation, we provide findings from our team’s survey of 15 NC DV/SA early-adopter programs currently using the statewide NC Data System. The programs were asked Likert-scale, open- and closed- ended questions about their experiences in using the Data System. From these survey data, we compiled recommendations and strategies that can support program efforts in other communities to train and transition into using similar data systems. Transitioning to an electronic survey database requires considerable program infrastructure, ongoing staff training and a system for reliable and consistent data entry. Our findings provide guidance to DV/SA programs regarding how best to carry out complex electronic data management tasks.