An Evaluation of the "Treatment Group Model for Abused Women" in Shelters in Hong Kong

Confidence in one's own worth or abilities; self-respect; feeling of powerlessness.

Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (Rosenberg, 1965) will be used to measure the self-esteem of the participants. This is a 10-item Likert-type scale on a 4-point scale ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree. The scores for the 10 items are then summed; the higher the score, the higher the participant's self-esteem.

Basic demographics data: Age, ethnicity, marital status, living arrangements with spouse/partner, education level, occupation, immigration status (if applicable), information on support network (family and friend), action plan (e.g., filing divorce, application of Injunctions)

Self-perceived social support from others

The Interpersonal Support Evaluation List-12 (ISEL-12) (Cohen et al., 1985), will be used to measure social support. It has has good psychometric properties and good internal consistency (Cronbach α = 0.88), was used to measure the perceived social support of abused women. The 12-item questionnaire measures 3 sub-scales consisting of appraisal, belonging and tangible support, each of which has 4 items. Each item scores from 0 (definitely false) to 3 (definitely true) giving a total score ranging from 0 to 36. The higher the score, the more the women perceive that they received social support.

Self-report symptoms corresponding to criteria for diagnosing depressive disorders

The Beck Depression Inventory version II (BDI-II) will be used to measure level of depression. It is a self-report instrument for the assessment of symptoms corresponding to criteria for diagnosing depressive disorders (Beck, Steer, & Brown, 1996). It consists of 21 groups of statements and requires the respondent to choose one statement in each group that best describes her during the previous two weeks. The BDI-II has been translated into Chinese and has demonstrated satisfactory validity and reliability (α ranged from .86 to .87) (Leung, 2001).

Self-report symptoms corresponding to criteria for diagnosing Post-traumatic Stress Disorder symptoms

The Chinese Version of the Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R) (Chen et al., 2005 Wu and Chan, 2003) will be used to assess the PTSD symptoms of participants. This is a 22-items self-report instrument to assess PTSD symptoms after a specific traumatic stressor. There are three subscales, including intrusive, avoidance, and hyperarousal symptoms, corresponding to the three dimensions of the DSM-IV criteria for PTSD (American Psychiatric Association, 1994). Each participant will be asked to indicate the frequency of their distress for each of the 22 items on four point scale (0=not at all, 1=seldom, 3=sometime, 4=often).

Health-related quality of life

The SF-12 - Short Form Health Survey (SF-12) will be used to assess health-related quality of life (Ware, Snow & Kosinski, 1993). It consists of 36 items with one measuring health transition and the remaining 35 grouped under eight scales: physical functioning (PF), role limitation due to physical health problems (role-physical; RP), bodily pain (BP), general health (GH), vitality (VT), social functioning (SF), role limitation due to emotional health problems (role-emotional; RE) and mental health (MH).

Spousal violence includes any form of physical, psychological and sexual abuse between experienced by the abused women.

The Chinese version of the Abuse Assessment Screen (C-AAS) will be used to assess participants for IPV. The C-AAS addresses physical, psychological and sexual abuse. The main difference between the original AAS for women (McFarlane, Parker, Soeken & Bullock, 1992) and the C-AAS is that the C-AAS addresses emotional and physical abuse separately in both lifetime and the preceding 3 months while the English AAS measures psychological and physical abuse simultaneously for the lifetime period.