Interdisciplinary Approaches to Violence and Mental Health Research

SW834, Section 001

Trainees will complete this three-credit seminar in their first term. It
will include: a panel of faculty and students from related training
programs (e.g., Gender & Mental Health) explaining the process of
inter-disciplinary scholarship and frameworks they have found useful;
presentations by our faculty and advanced students of their research that
exemplify interdisciplinary scholarship; the strengths and limitations of
broad frameworks for understanding violence; methods used by different
research traditions to understand violence; common ethical and practical
dilemmas in violence research; and examples of culturally competent
research. The nested ecological framework will be the primary organizing
framework. Trainees and faculty will describe the research traditions most
closely aligned with their professions and disciplines and begin the
process of comparing and contrasting different paradigms, research
traditions, and general theories. Qualitative and quantitative methods
will be covered and examples will be given of their integration in faculty
research projects.

The ecological framework will help students move beyond the research
traditions of their own disciplines and the specific theories and methods
tied to these traditions. For example, as we cover risk markers for
violence such as alcohol, personality disorders, jealousy, peer pressure,
and media violence exposure, we illustrate how they can each be explained
with theories from multiple levels of the social ecology. Students will
place the theory with which they are most familiar in the ecological
framework and begin to entertain other perspectives. Because of its
breadth, the ecological framework helps trainees to consider other
perspectives-from specific ways to alter a principle of their main
theoretical orientation, to integrating parts of it with other theories,
considering a wholly different perspective, or re-interpreting theories
through a macro theory (e.g., feminist theory, empowerment theory, etc).
As an outcome, when developing their own research studies, trainees are
better equipped to test competing hypotheses from different levels, to
include variables from different ecological levels in their design, and to
think about alternative explanations. Synthesis sometimes occurs through
the use of a general theory like general systems theory or the theory of
planned behavior.