Citation

Kafka JM, Moracco KE, Barrington C, Mortazavi AL. Qual. Health Res. 2019; 29(8): 1132-1144.

Affiliation

UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/1049732318821691

PMID

30608215

Abstract

Interview participants sometimes share anecdotes (stories about past events), to illustrate a point or discuss their perspectives. When sharing these stories, participants may imbue the events with their own personal meaning-making, selective memory, and biases. We conducted a narrative analysis of anecdotes shared by judges ( n = 20) who preside over Domestic Violence Protective Order (DVPO) hearings to examine how biases and misperceptions shape decisions in DVPO cases. We found that judges rely on biases to sort cases as "true domestic violence" compared with "frivolous cases." In the anecdotes they shared, judges often used gendered stereotypes to depict litigants, and many judges felt that DVPOs had limited efficacy in preventing violence. We argue that important cognitive insights are revealed by interview participants during the spontaneous act of storytelling. In the case of judges, their biases could lead to DVPOs being denied in situations when they are warranted.

Language: en

Keywords

United States of America; decision making; domestic abuse; domestic violence; legal issues; narrative analysis; narrative inquiry; qualitative; storytelling