Dr. Goodman and her students engage in community-based, participatory research (CBPR); that is, research that arises from and returns to the community. For us, this often entails working in deep partnership with domestic violence advocates and survivors or other marginalized communities. We pursue lines of research that are of interest to our community partners and aim to create  knowledge and resources that can be returned to them and the broader community.  CBPR is consistent with our feminist and social justice values: it gives voice to individuals and groups whose stories and perspectives often go unheard, it subverts exploitative and oppressive power dynamics between researchers and research subjects, and it leads to richer, more informative, and applicable research. For more details on this approach, please see the online toolkit we co-developed for emerging researchers interested in taking a CBPR approach to intimate violence research.

As for the focus of our research, we pursue several strands of scholarship. Most prominently, we explore the ways that intimate partner violence survivors experience the systems that are designed to support them but sometimes produce further harm. This research has focused especially on survivors with marginalized racial, ethnic, and/or sexual identities. A second strand explores the role of informal social supporters and broader social networks as firstline contributors to survivors' safety and healing (particularly for marginalized supporters); and how formal services can partner with people in these critical roles. A third strand of research involves developing measures that combine relevance and rigor in service of evaluating interventions for survivors of trauma and violence. Finally, a fourth strand focuses on developing and evaluating new methods of social justice teaching.

Dr. Goodman's research team is located within the Department of Counseling, Developmental and Educational Psychology in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. Consistent with our work with community partners, research within the research team is collaborative. New graduate students work together with more senior members of the lab on existing lines of research, participating in the conceptualization of research questions, collection and analysis of data, and writing and dissemination of findings. As they continue in their graduate studies, students begin to take leadership roles on projects and formulate their own questions and research studies. As a team, we meet regularly, brainstorm and problem solve together, share content and media that inform our thinking, laugh often, and grapple with big, challenging questions in an open and supportive environment.

Team members have gone on to pursue a range of careers across the domains of research, policy, and practice - generally with an emphasis on trauma.  We are still in close touch and serve as a network of mutual support and occasional collaboration.

For more information, please contact Dr. Goodman at lisa.goodman@bc.edu