Technology-Facilitated Domestic Violence Against Immigrant and Refugee Women: A Qualitative Study

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This qualitative research used methods such as gender studies and semi-structured interviews to attain findings.

With ethics approval, the research team conducted semi-structured interviews with 29 victim-survivors and 20 key stakeholders. Victim-survivor participants were recruited through multiple avenues, including advertisements on social media (e.g., Facebook, Gumtree, and Twitter), through victim support and advocacy stakeholder groups (e.g., domestic and family violence services), as well as on community and university noticeboards. Participants were required to be female, 18 years or older, from migrant background, and have experienced threats or abuse through technology, such as social media, phone/text, or sharing of private photos.

Participants were given the option of taking part in the research either by participating in a face-to-face interview, a telephone interview, or an online asynchronous discussion board, in which they logged in a time suitable to them to post comments or respond to text-based questions. Prior to the face-to-face and phone interviews, the project team ensured that participants were somewhere safe and private. For the online discussions, participants were able to provide their responses at any time on a secure platform with access via a unique password. At the conclusion of interviews, to acknowledge their contribution and/or compensate for any travel costs to attend the interview, victim-survivor participants received either $80 (AUD) for face-to-face interviews, $60 (AUD) for phone interviews, or $50 (AUD) for participation in online discussions.

All interviews were transcribed by an external specialist transcription agency, which were then anonymised. A single analytical framework was formulated from the discussion guide and an initial review of the interviews and discussion board data. Using this analytical framework, each data source was coded by the research team using Nvivo software to enable a thematic analysis of the data. The use of this thematic data coding technique ensured that the findings were directly traceable back to the raw data, thus providing a fully transparent analytical method.

One limitation was that our study undertook only a small number of interviews with victim-survivors and stakeholders to understand experiences, impacts, and help-seeking pathways. As such, our findings cannot be generalised or used to demonstrate the prevalence of TFDV among immigrant and refugee women more broadly. Moreover, we did not speak to women who spoke no or limited English, despite interpreters being available for those interviews. This meant that we did not capture the experiences of those women, who may be especially vulnerable.