Understanding the gap in research to practice transference in family and intimate partner violence prevention: The role of empirically evaluated programs

Despite laudable efforts at improving programs through the tenets of the scientific method (i.e. programs that are theory driven, empirically sound, and evaluated), violence committed amongst families and intimate partners remains an epidemic public health problem in the United States. Experts have recently suggested that the central reason for this problem lies in the gap between research and practice related to training, education, and organizational support among violence prevention workers. However, other researchers have published findings which suggest this gap is perpetuated by a lack of published evaluations for violence prevention programs or services. This contradiction in findings leads to a disagreement among researchers concerning where to place future resources. Thus, this study applied the systematic review methods of the Community Guide to Preventative Services data abstraction form in order to identify, retrieve, and review all published results of empirically evaluated family and intimate partner violence programs from the past two decades. Results of this review were mixed, indicating support for arguments that more research does need to be made available. In contrast, there is clearly a body of evidence based research that has been evaluated and published within the last few years which has been made available to practitioners. It is recommended from these results, that future research attempt to determine what facilitators and barriers exist from the perspective of family and intimate partner violence practitioners who are implementing these programs at the community-level.