Advocacy Interventions for Women Who Experience Intimate Partner Violence Show No Effects
This practice uses advocacy interventions to empower women who have experienced intimate partner violence. The goals of advocacy interventions include helping abused women to access necessary services, reducing or preventing incidents of abuse, and improving women’s physical and psychological health.
The practice is rated No Effects for reducing physical abuse. This Practice was originally rated Promising but has been updated to reflect findings from a more recent meta-analysis.
In 2015, the practice was rated Promising for reducing physical abuse, based on the review of a meta-analysis by Ramsay and colleagues (2009).
In 2019, an updated version of the original meta-analysis (Rivas et al. 2016) was reviewed. The rating was updated to reflect the review of the revised meta-analysis for the following reasons:
The original meta-analysis included two studies with a total sample size of 295, whereas the updated meta-analysis included 13 studies with a total sample size of 2,141. The increase in the number of studies adds more confidence to the findings of the updated meta-analysis.
In the original meta-analysis, all studies compared advocacy interventions with no care or usual care were included. However, in the updated meta-analysis, the authors acknowledged that sometimes usual care can still incorporate elements of advocacy. Therefore, in the updated meta-analysis, studies were excluded if the usual care condition included a substantial element of advocacy that was received by more than 20 percent of women in the control group.