The purpose of this study is to understand mental health status for female victims of a domestic violence and to examine correlation of social support on social adjustment of the victims. It was intended to suggest theoretical base and practical metho...
The purpose of this study is to understand mental health status for female victims of a domestic violence and to examine correlation of social support on social adjustment of the victims. It was intended to suggest theoretical base and practical method on social support to improve social adjustment on female victim of a domestic violence.
To achieve studying purpose, questionnaire was performed for 301 female housed in 31 shelters for domestic violence victims.
The result was as follows:
First, there were different levels of post traumatic stress disorder according to their religions and self-respect according to educational background. When their mental reliance came from family, relatives, and friends, high degree of depression was shown and when their mental reliance came from neighbors, social worker and professional social work staffs, degree of depression was shown relatively low.
Second, avoidance numbness and arousal reaction was increased and self-esteem was decreased. When depression was high, social adjustment was low, it decrease avoidance numbness and arousal reaction and when self-esteem was increased, because depression was lowered, it suggested that social adjustment could be increased.
Third, post traumatic stress disorder and depression were negatively correlated with social adjustment, while self-esteem and social support showed positive correlation. High self-esteem enhanced social support, but post traumatic stress disorder and depression didn't affect the level of social support. However, the adjustment of social support was efficient to convert post traumatic stress disorder and depression to positive effect, and it has been lowered the influence of self-esteem. Therefore, the negative influence of post traumatic stress disorder and depression was changed into positive pressure due to adjustment of social support.
Finally, among subordinate factors of social support, only informative support was found to be a factor which makes significant influence to social adjustment. The lower post traumatic stress disorder victims experienced and the higher they had self-esteem, the higher informative support was.
The implications of these results on social welfare are as follow;
First, by strengthening a role of social workers for female victims of the domestic violence as social supporters, they should be helpful for increasing social adjustment of victims of domestic violence. Especially, focusing to provide informational support among social supports, comprehensive service such as concrete information supply, connection between local society resource, etc that wer needed to increase social adjustment of female victims of domestic violence should be provided
Second, among social support of female victims of domestic violence, information support had intermediation effect. Especially such intermediation effect decreased post traumatic stress disorder. Therefore, by providing social support that female victim of domestic violence subjectively felt in various local social welfare system such as domestic violence advice office, mental health center, general welfare hall, self-support agency, etc, social welfare intervention that can decrease negative mental health elements such as post traumatic stress disorder, depression, etc should be practiced.