The Insight Exchange Foundation and survey analysis

Last year, the Insight Exchange Foundation (Domestic Violence Service Management) was looking to understand the perceptions of people who lived experiences of domestic and family violence (DFV) during employment.

Jennifer Sloane, a Civita volunteer and active community member, helped the Domestic Violence Service Management (DVSM) team organise, clean, and analyse data obtained from a survey completed by over 1,000 individuals in Australia.

The organisation, project and goal

The DVSM is a charity that provides support for people experiencing domestic and family violence (DFV) and homelessness. In 2019, the organisation distributed a survey to better understand victims’ perception of workplace responses to DFV.

In 2017, 1 in 6 of women have experienced violence from their partner. Yet, in the same year, only 20% of employees would have felt confident enough to offer help to a colleague who may be experiencing abuse. The results of this survey helped DVSM understand the current landscape of how Australian workplaces support their employees and what actions may be taken to create a truly supportive workplaces in a country where 2.2 million Australians have experienced some form of physical, psychological or sexual abuse/violence from a current or previous partner.

Challenges

Rebecca, the Assistant Director at Insight Exchange Foundation, explains: “after the survey had been open for a short time, it became clear that people without lived experience of DFV were also responding to the survey. A screening question was therefore introduced to ensure only people with lived experience of DFV, proceeded to answer the bulk of survey questions.” From that point, since the questions structure had changed mid-way through, Jennifer needed to clean the data accordingly. In addition to that, the data visualisation tools of SurveyMonkey — the tool used for the survey — did not allow visualisations that were consistent with the “look and feel” of DVSM.

Resolution

“We worked with Jennifer through this process first to ensure that only respondents with lived experiences of DFV were included in the analysis, and then to ensure we were clear what the N was for each question and accurately represent the results.” explains Rebecca.

“We also requested a sector breakdown of respondents to share with unions who had promoted the survey to their members.” Jennifer explains, “Using the programming language R, I was able to help the DVSM’s team organise and analyse the large number of survey responses. For me, the main goal and challenge was to create visualisations that provided useful information and were easy to interpret. Fortunately, R is well-known for its visualisations and I used ggplot to create the figures. For some final touches, I incorporated DVSM’s specific brand colours into the figures.”

A majority of respondents were not comfortable sharing their experience

The results were striking:

• approximately half of the respondents didn’t know if their employers had a DFV policy,
• A majority (66%) of employees experiencing DFV did not choose to disclose it to their employer, and
• Among the ones who did find the courage to share it at their workplace, 56% described the experience of sharing it negative, mixed or neutral.

One of the main reasons for not disclosing it were the feelings of embarrassment, shame or fear of judgement. The lack of trust and safety in the workplace was another reason for not sharing their personal experiences.

Find all the insights of the survey in the report.

Conclusion

This experience was a positive experience for both parties:

Jennifer concludes, “As a cognitive psychology PhD student, I use R to analyse data and/or create visualisations pretty much every day for my own research. However, I always try to find ways to apply my knowledge to real-world problems. I volunteered to help the DVSM on this project because I was inspired by their mission of helping those in need and I knew I had the tools to help. It was a great opportunity and experience for me and I’m glad I was able to use my skills to help such an inspiring organisation.”

“As a small not-for-profit charity”, says Rebecca, “we did not have the coding skills in-house to do this work. Jennifers’s skills and objective support enabled us to give voice to the many hundreds of people who shared their insights with us through the survey. Thanks to Jennifer and Civita, we were able to ensure their insights were represented accurately and published in a visual form, for the benefit of others.”

Do you want to know how you can leverage open data for your own organisation or community? Get in touch with our team.