A Cross-Cultural Understanding of Depression Among Abused Women

Janet Y. H. Wong is an assistant professor at the School of Nursing of the University of Hong Kong. She received her PhD at the University of Hong Kong in 2011 and was awarded a Fulbright visiting scholarship (2010–2011) affiliated with the University of Virginia in the United States during her PhD study. Her principal research area is intimate partner violence (IPV) against women, including in marriage and dating relationships. She is particularly interested in brain-body interactions linking physical, neurological, psychological, and social factors to health and disease vulnerability in abused women such as depression, anxiety, psychosomatic symptoms and cognitive impairment. Some of her work focuses on advances in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and heart rate variability (HRV) integrated with the field of biobehavioral medicine and stress physiology to understand the impact of IPV on abused women’s health. She is also committed to address the needs of college women and sexual minority women in dating relationships. In order to connect her research to practice, she conducts innovative workshops entitled Dating C.A.F.E. to educate college students as ambassadors to have compassionate (C) heart to help peers, and equip them with the necessary skills of assessment (A) of dating violence, referral making in the local system (F), and educating (E) peers to enhance awareness of dating abuse and violence in campus. Her principal research interest lies in intimate partner violence, and physical, psychological, and cognitive well-being of abused women. She has examined the factors that place abused women at risk of depression, as well as the neurobiological impact of abuse and violence on women. During her PhD study, she had been awarded Fulbright visiting scholarship (2010-2011) affiliated with University of Virginia in the United States of America.

Agnes Tiwari is a professor and head of the School of Nursing at the University of Hong Kong. Professor Tiwari has focused her research on the prevention of family violence, including primary prevention of violence against women and their unborn children by engaging men in antenatal care; secondary prevention of intimate partnerviolence victimization and child abuse among community-dwelling immigrant women from Mainland China; and tertiary prevention of adverse health effects from recurrent violence among women taking refuge in shelters for battered women in Hong Kong. More recently, she has begun tackling the challenge of elder abuse prevention in Chinese societies by providing evidence-based interventions to reduce caregiver stress among family caregivers. While her research has been conducted in the context of Chinese culture and communities, her work on evidence-based intervention models has been cited as key evidence to inform policy, practice and research to prevent violence against women and children globally, for example, the Institute of Medicine Forum on Global Violence Prevention and the WHO Guidelines on Health Sector Response to Violence against Women. Professor Tiwari is internationally recognized for her work on interpersonal violence prevention and intervention including the validation of the Chinese Abuse Assessment Screen and several clinical trials of violence prevention models at primary, secondary, and tertiary levels. She is also the member of the Guidelines Development Group for Health Sector Response to Violence Against Women in World Health Organization.

Daniel Y. T. Fong is an associate professor at the School of Nursing of the University of Hong Kong. He received his degrees of BSc in Mathematics and MPhil in Statistics from the University of Hong Kong. He then obtained his PhD in Statistics from the University of Waterloo, Canada. Dr Fong is an experienced biostatistician in health research with over 15 years of experience in clinical trials and statistical consulting. Specifically, he focuses on the application of the best available methods to scientific research in health-related fields, and to develop novel methodologies that could improve the application. Dr Fong’s main research themes are Adolescent Idiopathic Scoliosis (AIS) and Patient Reported Outcomes (PRO). His work on AIS has provided new highly graded evidence on a long controversy of scoliosis screening, and his team was invited to participate in an international task force to review the current evidence of screening for AIS. The team’s research has shown how physical activity may help improve clinical outcomes including quality of life, and ensured that reliable and valid PRO tools are being used in practice, which include but not limited to the SF-12, Chinese Breast Cancer Screen, and Functional Living Index - Cancer. He received his degrees of BSc in mathematics and MPhil in statistics from the University of Hong Kong. He then obtained his PhD in statistics from the University of Waterloo, Canada. He is an experienced biostatistician in health research. Specifically, he focuses on the application of the best available methods to scientific research in health-related fields, and to develop novel methodologies that could improve the application.

Linda Bullock is a Jeanette Lancaster Alumni professor of nursing and associate dean for research at the School of Nursing of the University of Virginia. Her research was the first to provide empirical evidence of the connection between abuse during pregnancy and infant low birth weight. Her continued research on the health outcomes of abuse during pregnancy resulted in the development and testing of an innovative nurse-delivered telephone social support intervention to reduce stress-induced responses, such as smoking, and to improve developmental outcomes in infants exposed to abuse. She has conducted multiple randomized controlled trials with pregnant women and their children in Missouri, with funding from the National Institute of Nursing Research and the National Institute of Child and Human Development. She worked with the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services to implement the DOVE research study into home visiting programs in rural Missouri and is now Co-PI of the DOVE II study with rural sites in Virginia and Missouri. She developed a nurse-delivered, telephone-based, social support intervention to reduce stress-induced responses to abuse in pregnant women and improve developmental outcomes for abused infants by using randomized, controlled trials in Missouri. She recently received a US$4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to design a tablet software to identify mothers and expectant mothers at risk of domestic violence to talk more about domestic violence during home visits in rural Virginia.