What protects university student IPV survivors from psychological distress?

According to the first of today's Five Studies About+: Intimate Partner Violence

Welcome to The Art of Explaining Crime, the independent newsletter that helps you think and write about crime.

Two editions of Five Studies About are published each week: Five Studies About (free) and Five Studies About+ (paid, more in-depth). Each is a tip sheet where I curate recent crime and justice studies related to one topic. Today’s topic is intimate partner violence (IPV).

---

Photo by David Stewart, credit to homegets.com, CC BY 2.0. Modified by Aaron Jacklin in Canva.

These new crime studies related to intimate partner violence were recently published by journals I monitor: Each of the following study listings include two quotations from the study’s abstract. The first quote discusses what the researchers set out to find and the second describes what they found.

1. The Effect of Intimate Partner Violence on Psychological Distress and Suicidal Ideation: An Investigation of Protective Factors Among University Students in the USA [Journal of Interpersonal Violence]

What they sought: “This study used the American College Health Assessment (ACHA) dataset to examine protective factors (campus belonging, campus safety, flourishing, and resilience) in addressing psychological distress and suicidal ideation among college student survivors of IPV.”

What they found: “Survivors of IPV reported greater psychological distress (B = 0.96, p < .05, R2 = 0.39) and suicidal ideation (B = 1.26, p < .001, R2 = 0.30) than non-survivors. All hypothesized protective factors significantly mitigated the negative mental health outcomes associated with IPV while highlighting the ways that experiencing IPV can reduce the strength of some of these traditionally emphasized protective pathways for students. Namely, campus safety and flourishing offered additional protection for survivors of IPV compared to those who had not experienced IPV.”