5

Collaborative analysis/
Recommendations

It is impossible to define exactly when we started the analysis of our experience in this project. When we came into the project, we already had some " understanding of why things happen the way they do. By participating in the research process, we had a chance to reflect on those understandings, to observe our work from a different perspective.

At the second workshop we engaged in intense and wide-ranging discussions about many of the issues women had identified over the last six months. In Frances's session with the web charts, women made some concrete connections among these issues. During the second interview we looked at some of those connections as the beginning of our collaborative analysis. When women identified the three issues that they had become most aware of during the research process, most responded out of their awareness of what had happened across the country.

By the time we came to the third workshop we had almost all the program documentation. We put together our interpretations of the documentation the first full day. The second full day we developed analysis statements that were later edited and categorized, then approved by the women who attended the workshop.

All these activities contributed to our collaborative analysis. They are included here with the project recommendations that provide a framework for further action.

5-1 The web charts from the second workshop

An outline of the first web chart appears in Chapter Three of this book. Two more appear here. Although many of the issues raised were similar, each web reflects the experiences of the women involved in building it. For example, while each of the groups identified violence in women's lives as a central issue, how that issue was expressed is very different.

In the second group, violence was first named as abuse and powerlessness. One woman talked about a group of men who were breaking into women's homes and terrorizing them. She pointed out that professionals often blame the women for this - somehow, it's their fault. If those same men were breaking into businesses, however, it would be stopped immediately.