Informing the Research Agenda on Domestic Abuser Intervention Through Practitioner-Researcher Dialogues

Abstract

Officials in the state of Maryland have adopted the goal of establishing empirically based practice standards for intervention programs that work with domestic abuse perpetrators. This article highlights a set of roundtable discussions between practitioners, policy makers, and researchers, the goal of which was to inform the research agenda on Abuser Intervention Programs (AIPs). Contextual material is provided on the gap between practice and research in mental health disciplines in general and on the need for structured communication between practitioners and researchers to help bridge this gap. Roundtable participants emphasized a number of important research directions that converge and diverge with recent trends in research on domestic abuse perpetrators and AIPs.