Doctoral Dissertation Research: Intersections of The Mind and the Body in Hospital-Based Violence Intervention Programs

University Of Maryland, College Park, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2). Violence disproportionately affects certain communities. The ways by which support is offered to individuals and communities affected by violence is often based on one-size-fits-all models that fail to consider how individual- and community-level attributes affect responses to interventions. This doctoral dissertation research uses theory from medical and psychological anthropology to frame an investigation of how hospital-based violence intervention programs (HVIPs) intersect with individual attributes and personal concepts of violence and healing to impact health and well-being among individuals who have experienced traumatic violence. In doing so, this project offers a contextually informed understanding of the experiences of individuals who survive violent injury, offering insights to facilitate improvement of HVIP recruitment, retention, and programming. This research trains a doctoral student in cultural anthropological science and method and will disseminate results widely to academic and non-academic audiences and interested stakeholders. This research builds upon and extends anthropological theories of emotion, care, embodiment, and deservingness to investigate how affective experiences influence personal feelings of discomfort, wellbeing, and illness related to violent injury via three specific objectives: 1) characterizing the emotional experiences of PTSD in HVIP settings; 2) understanding how HVIPs conceptualize violence and encourage coping strategies; and 3) examining how concepts of violence interact with concepts of care and patient response to impact health, well-being, and access to psycho-social support. A mixed methods approach is used to investigate these issues within two trauma centers dealing with significant traumatic violence patient loads. The methods include participant observation, ethnographic interviews, validated quantitative measures of mental health, and descriptive statistics of relevant demographic data. The findings inform the ways in which affected individuals understand and interpret their emotions to provide alternative theorizations of conditions of violence as experienced by victims. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.