Confronting Violence

Understanding Harassment of Abused Women Via Interpretive Interactionism, ca. 1994

While working towards his doctorate in nursing at Oregon Health & Sciences University in Portland, Daniel Sheridan wrote this paper on his work developing HARASS (Harassment in Abusive Relationships: A Self-Report Scale) and testing a pilot HARASS questionnaire. Using "Interpretive Interactionism," a social science research methodology and theoretical framework, Sheridan incorporated autobiographical details and 'lived experiences' of women who were battered and with whom he had worked. He considered those details and experiences integral to how he had come to identify and create HARASS, a tool to measure harassment of women in abusive relationships, in order to prevent lethal violence against them.

Courtesy National Library of Medicine