Ethical and safety considerations when obtaining information from and about battered women for research purposes

More and more researchers, evaluators, and policy makers are recognizing that in order to best understand the factors precipitating, supporting, and prohibiting inti-mate violence against women, we must often gather information directly from bat-tered women themselves. Such data collection, however, is not without its risks to the women involved in such studies. It is important that researchers and evaluators con-sider ethical issues, especially but not limited to those related to safety and confiden-tiality, before attempting to gather information either directly from battered women or through their records or files. This article provides a number of practical strate-gies and protocols that have been used successfully when gathering sensitive information from and about women with abusive partners