Collaboration in domestic and family violence services: a mixed-method study using practitioners' perspectives

Abstract

Collaboration is a routine part of practice in social service organisations, including those in non-government domestic and family violence (DFV) services. Like other aspects of practice, the ways collaborations occur and their effectiveness matter to service delivery outcomes and practitioners’ experiences of their work and their sense of efficacy. This thesis deepens understanding of the nature and motivation for collaboration and investigates what makes collaborations effective, using the perceptions and experiences of DFV practitioners who collaborate in their daily work. The study draws together insights from resource dependence theory, interorganisational network theory, and feminist social work theory. It utilises data that was collected using a sequential mixed method approach, designed to capture practitioners’ accounts and experiences of collaborating in the specific context of DFV services in New South Wales. The first stage involved case studies of three DFV service organisations. The case studies explored how practitioners experience and perceive collaboration, their motivations for collaborating, the forms collaborations take, how organisations and practitioners evaluate effectiveness, and the factors contributing to success. The second stage involved a quantitative survey that supplied information on collaborations, including frequencies of motivations and forms, various internal and external factors, and their correlations with the perceived effectiveness of collaboration. The study delivers a range of significant results that concern many aspects of working in the sector, including trust, formal and informal approaches to evaluation, and partner selection strategies. Reported results demonstrate that collaborations are most frequently motivated by the desire to provide the best possible quality of services to clients. Practitioners frequently understand collaboration as a referral of a client to a partner organisation as they focus their efforts on service delivery. The study showed that in successful collaborations, interpersonal ties play a crucial role in establishing and maintaining them, with trustful and mutually beneficial relationships being perceived by practitioners as the most effective. The study argues that adherence to feminist values and promoting relational skills can be the key to effective collaboration between DFV services.