"You Can't Just Get Up in the Morning and Do It": Bridging the Partner Violence and Substance Use Services Fields

This project addresses three questions: Why, despite need and available models, do so few organizations address both partner violence and substance use? What allows some organizations to address these issues together when most do not? And, when organizations address both partner violence and substance use, what strategies do they use? My answers draw on field theory and multiple kinds of data, including key informant interviews; exploratory, quantitative analysis of organizational practices; and archival research into the histories of both fields. Focused on metropolitan Chicago, a region with a history of support for approaches drawing from both fields, I find very few organizations address both partner violence and substance use. This is due to incompatibilities between the central logics of the two fields at the time of their emergence in the 1970s. Due to ongoing efforts to bring the two fields into greater alignment since the early 1980s, the degree of incapability between their logics has been reduced, although regulatory and funding barriers remain. Despite this, some organizations address both issues together, a practice more common amongst those in the partner violence field, organizations offering services for trauma, and organizations in lower status positions in their primary field. However, most organizations with services for both issues do not actually address them together. Instead, services for both issues exist as separate tracks within the same larger organization. This pattern is the combined results of funding pressures and regulatory barriers, which stem from differences in field-level logics. Organizations addressing both issues together in a substantive way tend to be higher status, underscoring the high level of resources needed to bridge both fields. This suggests the need to ask not just whether organizations address both issues but how they accomplish this work. The success of efforts to support people experiencing both partner violence and substance use hinges on careful navigation of convergences and tensions between fields. Through specifying attention to barriers stemming from field-level logics, resources, regulations, and networks, this dissertation provides a blue print for future efforts in this direction.PhDSocial Work & SociologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/138741/1/elimarie_1.pd