چکیده (انگلیسی):

The Family Violence Councils (FVC) are collaborative settings that bring together various organizationsinvolved in the systems response to family violence. Social network analysis (SNA) is a technique thatallows one to assess the connections between members (e.g., agencies) within a particular boundednetwork (Scott, 1991) and is well-suited to the study of councils. Centrality measures in SNA indicatewhich members in the network are central and prominent players in the setting, and therefore might becritical to engage in change efforts. The current study applied three centrality measures in five councilsto identify consistent patterns regarding which organizations tend to be most central in the exchangeof information among agencies responding to family violence. Further, the study examined whether andwhich type of centrality was related to the degree to which a given organization’s policy and practiceswere influenced by council efforts. The study found domestic violence programs were significantly morelikely to emerge as central in these settings. The study also found a relationship between an organization’scentrality and perceived shifts in its policy and practices. However, only one type of centrality measure,namely closeness centrality, emerged as significantly predicting outcomes of interest when all three were examined simultaneously. The implications of these findings for research and practice will be discussed.