An estimated 4.8 million intimate partner assaults are perpetrated against women annually. Health care professionals who care for abused women frequently ask, "why don't you just leave your abuser? " The factors that influence women's safety actions and decisions to stay or leave an abusive relationship are multifaceted and complex. Abused women have long known that ending an abusive relationship increases their risk of lethal violence in the short-term. Women must carefully weigh the risks and benefits for self and family prior to taking action.

Our objective in this 18-month exploratory study is to develop, translate to Spanish and evaluate the first computerized decision aid for abused women in the community. We hypothesize that after using the decision aid:

1. Women will have increased understanding about the factors influencing their decisions to take action toward increased safety.
2. Women's ethnicity will influence the weighting of factors that determine desire to take action towards increased safety.

We propose the following 2 specific aims:

1. Develop and validate a precise method to measure factors among abused women who are considering action to increase safety of self and family. Through previously validated methods, we will create a computerized decisional aid and evaluate it with abused Latina and non-Latina women using structured interviews and focus group sessions. The participants will use the decision aid and provide feedback related to face-validity. We will estimate the precision of the decision aid with a measure of internal consistency for these early testers.
2. To compare the importance of the decisional factors of Latina and non-Latina abused women. We will recruit 40 women (20 Latina and 20 non-Latina) from existing support groups for abused women conducted by our community partner to test the revised computerized decisional aid.

To test our first study hypothesis, we will compare pre and post scores for all women using a validated scale of decisional conflict with a paired t-test for repeated measures. To test our second hypothesis related to ethnicity, we will compare the importance of each decisional factor for each woman using t-tests for the two independent samples (Latina and non-Latina women).

Co-Principal Investigators: Karen Eden, PhD and Nancy Glass, PhD, MPH, RN