Although trauma-informed practice is a core value of domestic violence programs internationally, to date we have not had a way to measure — from survivors themselves — the extent to which programs are engaging in such practice. With colleagues from Boston College (Dr. Lisa Goodman, Joshua Wilson, Jennifer Fauci, and Craig DiGiovanni) and the National Latin@ Network for Healthy Families and Communities (Drs. Josie Serrata and Julia Perilla), Cris Sullivan set out to fill this gap through a university-community collaboration that included national experts on TIP in a DV context, as well as survivors, advocates, and programs. Together, we developed and tested a new measure of Trauma Informed Practices (TIP), which is now available in English and Spanish.

The final TIP Scales correspond remarkably well with existing literature on trauma-informed practice in the DV context. They assess the following six domains of trauma informed practice:
Environment of Agency and Mutual Respect
Access to Information on Trauma
Opportunities for Connection
Emphasis on Strengths
Cultural Responsiveness and Inclusivity
Support for Parenting

While we hope the TIP will be useful to researchers, it was also created to be used easily by community programs so that they can:

1) Identify their areas of strength and weakness
2) Improve their practices.
3) Demonstrate to funders and other key stakeholders that they are incorporating trauma-informed principles into their work.

To help programs use the TIP, we created a toolkit that explains how to administer, score and interpret the TIP: toolkit

This study received funding from the National Center on Domestic Violence, Trauma & Mental Health; Boston College; and Michigan State University.