The proposed research will investigate the role of alcohol consumption in violent victimization experienced by American Indian women, and will examine women's attitudes, expectancies, and beliefs about drinking, violence, and American Indian culture. The focus of the formative research will be experiences of violent victimization in which the aggressor is known to the victim, but will not be limited to domestic assaults. The methods include three components: a qualitative component including qualitative interviews with American Indian alcohol and violence experts, and focus groups; a survey of purposively selected agency clients; and an incident-based analysis of recent violent episodes. Five hundred American Indian women aged 18-44 years will be recruited from agencies serving American Indians in California. An agency-based sampling design was chosen as appropriate for this exploratory study. Subjects will be queried about ever having had violent victimization, and will be screened for any incident during the past 12 months. It is estimated that 125 of the 500 will report a past-year incident, and these will be queried about most recent event. To generate testable hypotheses, research questions about the relationships among personal and family history of alcohol problems, attitudes about drinking and violence, violent victimization, and identification with American Indian culture will be investigated. For the most recent past-year incidents, research questions about alcohol consumption by the victim and/or aggressor prior to the event, early exposure to violence, and coping strategies, including informal and formal help-seeking will also be examined. Multivariate analyses will be used to estimate the relative contribution or power of key variables in explaining violent victimization and alcohol-related episodes. These include demographics; attitudes and beliefs about drinking and violence; subject, partner and family histories of alcohol and drug problems; relationship of victim to aggressor; early exposure to violence; and degree of involvement in and identification with American Indian culture. The in-depth qualitative interviews will be conducted with 40 American Indian service providers and other community leaders with expertise on American Indian drinking patterns and violence. These qualitative interviews are designed to, along with the focus group data, inform instrumentation for the interviews with the sample of 500 and subsample of 125 women. The overall goals of the exploratory research are to learn more about attitudes and experiences regarding the contribution of alcohol (and drug) use to violence experienced by Indian women in order to develop testable hypotheses for future research, and to provide data for use in developing prevention efforts, and to strengthen research measures for alcohol and violence prevention.
