Rethinking Child Custody, Domestic Violence - Rutgers NJAES ...

twice as many injuries as auto accidents, widely believed to be the most common causeof adult injury at the time. Moreover, while the emergency room visit during the sampleyear was the point of contact through which women entered our sample, we consideredall of their adult visits, including those to nonemergent as well as emergent medical sites.But the most important point is that our findings have been replicated in numerous healthsettings and found to be conservative.Several hundred books and more than 12,000 research monographs on domesticviolence have been published in the last two decades (MacMillan & Wathen, 2005). Forevaluators who hope to narrow the gap between this bourgeoning knowledge base andtheir practice, the challenge has less to do with exposing “myths” lifted from the internetthan with identifying the best science available. Even evaluators who lack specializedtraining in methodology should strive to distinguish the quality of research they draw onby whether it has been peer reviewed; whether the samples reported are representative ofsome larger group to whom generalizations are applied; whether conclusions are based onrandomization, control comparisons, comparisons with baseline rates or a systematic orsophisticated interpretation of qualitative data; whether study findings are pertinent to thesituations encountered in custody disputes; whether their validity or reliability suggestsinstruments are measuring what they claim to be measuring; whether there is anyobjective evidence that what is reported has actually occurred and whether alternative,competing or contradictory explanations for observed phenomenon have been considered.None of the evidence cited as authoritative by Gould and his colleagues meets thesestandards, even minimally.The Political Context for Evaluation Decisions: Does “Gender Specific” = Bias?