Introduction to second special issue on violence exposure in children, adolescents, and women: the lived experience.

摘要

As a nurse scientist for the past 20 years, my research has focused on the relationship between social support and postpar-tum depression. In 2004, my research team and I conducted a study to investigate if the need for social support varied by age in low-income adolescent mothers (Logsdon, Gagne, Hughes, Patterson, & Rakestraw, 2005). Data was collected by focus groups, using an interview guide but allowing the adolescent mothers to tell us their stories regarding social support. A serendipitous finding of the research study was that our sample of adolescent mothers lived in a world filled with constant exposure to personal, family, and community violence. The violence contributed to the context in which the adolescent mothers received social support. In a follow up study of low-income adolescent mothers based on the Bioecological Model and measuring comprehensive contextual variables (Logsdon, Ziegler, Hertweck, & Pinto Foltz, 2008), both witnessing and being a victim of violence predicted symptoms of depression.