Characterizing Disparities in the Treatment of Intimate Partner Violence.

Abstract

Exposure to Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) has lasting adverse effects on the physical, behavioral, cognitive, and emotional health of survivors. To this end, it is critical to understand the effectiveness of IPV treatment strategies in reducing IPV and its debilitating effects. Meta-analyses designed to comprehensively describe the effectiveness of treatments offer unique advantages. However, the heterogeneity within and between studies poses challenges in interpreting findings. Meta-analyses are therefore unlikely to identify the factors that underlie disparities in treatment efficacy. To characterize the effect of demographic and social factors on treatment effectiveness, we develop a comprehensive computational and statistical framework that uses Meta-regression to characterize the effect of demographic and social variables on treatment outcomes. The innovations in our methodology include (i) standardization of outcome variables to enable meaningful comparisons among studies, and (ii) two parallel meta-regression pipelines to reliably handle missing data.