MALE VICTIMS OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE Informing Social ... - Amen

group. These men represented thirty percent of the support group at this particular
meeting and as Amen is the only existing support group in Ireland, it remains out of
reach for a large number of the population. I contacted Mary Cleary in Amen and told
her about my final year dissertation on male victims of domestic violence. Mary was
delighted to help and told me that “the men will talk to any one that is willing to listen”.
Mary told me that a support group meeting is held every Tuesday night and we arranged
to have the focus group on 15 th March 2005. As Amen is located in Navan, Co. Meath,
I needed to travel from Cork and back to carry out the focus group. When I arrived in
Navan for the focus group, I introduced myself and explained to the men who I was and
about the focus group, five of the men volunteered to participate in the focus group.
The members of the focus group were aged between thirty and sixty-five. Occupations
were school teacher, Farmer, Mechanic and the Garda Siochanna. The period of abuse
also ranged from five years to thirty years. The focus group was recorded and lasted for
a period of two hours. The focus group was conducted using an open semi-structured
format that consisted of seven open-ended questions (Appendix 2). These questions
were comprised from the themes laid out by the research aim (Appendix 1).
After reviewing the recorded interview for the focus group, I calculated that there were
over ten thousand words to be transcribed. As this would be extremely time consuming
I decided to listen to the recording a number of times before making a summary of the
data generated (Appendix 4). This summary was compiled using the research themes
(Appendix 1) and contains over two thousand words.
The second group interviewed ‘Group (B)’, consisted of individual interviews with
three social workers. Each interview was recorded and lasted for approximately thirty
minutes. The interviews were conducted using a semi-structured format that consisted
of seven open-ended questions (Appendix 3). These questions were comprised from the
information gained through the focus group (Appendix 4) and the themes laid out by the
research aim (Appendix 1). The same method of sampling, non-probability sampling,
was used to generate ‘Group (B)’. From talking to social workers in relation to this
research, there seems to be a very low contact rate between social workers and male
victims of domestic violence. The disadvantage of this type of sampling with ‘Group
(B)’ was that the samples obtained by this method were likely to be unrepresentative by
their profession (Pole and Lampard. 2002).
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