Hello, AEA365 community! Liz DiLuzio here, Lead Curator of the blog. This week is Individuals Week, which means we take a break from our themed weeks and spotlight the Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources and Lessons Learned from any evaluator interested in sharing. Would you like to contribute to future individuals weeks? Email me at AEA365@eval.org with an idea or a draft and we will make it happen.
Hello, I am Titilayo Ogunbambi, a community psychologist and evaluator affiliated with National Louis University, Chicago, Illinois. I spent the past decade supporting survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV), engaging in prevention efforts, and evaluating social, cultural, and relational drivers influencing IPV across different contexts. More recently, I had the opportunity to examine the challenges and barriers impeding IPV help-seeking and the use of available formal services among African immigrant women in the United States by interviewing frontline service providers, advocates, and coalition members at the United African Organization in Chicago. The findings inform a culturally responsive framework for co-creating IPV services (See Figure 1 below) and provide evaluators with practical ways to understand reasons why existing systems fall short of addressing IPV and what is needed to design programs that genuinely meet the needs of vulnerable communities.
Lesson Learned
1. IPV is commonly characterized by patterns of control, fear, coercion, silence, physical, emotional, or psychological harm. These factors may appear similar across cultures; however, the forces that sustain them are often culturally specific. In many African family contexts, control is reinforced by an abusive partner in addition to broader systems of authorities like family elders, family lineage, expectations of male leadership, family honor, faith, or traditional norms that normalize male dominance. Violence and abuse in these settings are inseparable from displacement, identity, and the fracturing of gender roles that migration brings, requiring responses that account for both IPV and post-migration-related realities.
For evaluators: IPV is not only an individual relationship problem; IPV is also a community problem with cultural risk and protective factors. Tools that move beyond individual-level definitions of abuse to also include cultural structures are needed to remove some of the current barriers to help-seeking.
2. Psychosocial and structural barriers are often not simply secondary effects of IPV; they affect how women interpret danger and whether safety feels attainable at all. This framework shows that IPV barriers are neither purely external nor purely internal. Rather, barriers are embedded in broader social worlds and systems that determine what women believe is possible when experiencing abuse. Leaving, reporting, or disclosing IPV carries high social and cultural costs, making help-seeking feel risky even when services exist.
For evaluators: Safety means different things depending on who defines it, for whom, and within what cultural context. Therefore, a culturally responsive evaluation should account for safety as relational, culturally mediated, and socially interpreted.
3. IPV service delivery requires a new lens that addresses the structural gaps created when formal institutions overlook survivors’ emotional and relational needs. The goal is to build a service ecosystem where marginalized and vulnerable women are not forced to abandon their cultural worlds to access safety but are supported within them. This community-informed pathway model calls for infusing existing systems with cultural relevance and responsive practices co-created with the communities they serve. Because these dynamics extend beyond African immigrant communities, the model may also offer a useful foundation for other immigrant populations navigating similar barriers.
For evaluators: Low program utilization is often not a client problem. It is more of a systems design problem that signals an opportunity to redesign systems around the strengths, priorities, and cultural realities of the communities they are intended to serve.
The Culturally Responsive Framework for Co-Creating Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) Services, developed directly from this evaluation, maps the interconnected forces shaping African immigrant women’s experiences of IPV and points to what culturally responsive service delivery looks like in practice. The arrows represent barriers that evaluations need to account for, and the pathways at the bottom reflect provider-informed strategies that offer a grounded starting point for co-creating services with the communities they serve.
Figure 1
My full dissertation includes a six-category thematic analysis and illustrative service pathway and is available here: Digital Commons at National Louis University.
The question I carry into every evaluation room: Are we designing interventions for the people we imagine or for the people who actually exist, rooted in community, shaped by culture, and making decisions our frameworks have not yet thought to ask about?
Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please do so using the form on our website. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.
Such a comprehensive framework for responders in the DV space.
We should design interventions for ppl who exist and use that data to predict for others-those we imagine.