Gains Made by Men Attending a Battering Intervention Program: Insights From Exit Letters Written by BIP Clients From 1990 to 2015

Research on battering intervention programs (BIPs) has expanded significantly in the last several years to include qualitative measures of men’s experiences in such programs. This research has provided useful insights into what gains men who perpetrate violence may take away from BIPs. However, to expand our definition of success for BIPs and better understand the full range of potential benefits to clients of such programs, more research is needed that seeks to describe clients’ perspectives on what they learned from a BIP. The present study uses clients’ written reflections on their experience with a community-based BIP to understand what gains clients described making during the BIP process. We analyzed a random sample of 555 exit letters collected from a participating BIP to understand what clients felt they had learned during their time in the program. Analysis was conducted using a three-coder iterative approach, which focused on content and global coding of broad thematic and subthematic categories. Our findings suggest that BIP clients leave programs with both didactic or psychoeducational and interpersonal and intrapersonal gains that may need to be considered as alternative measures of success for such programs. This study is important for identifying ways to increase the understanding of BIP “success” by suggesting potential outcomes that could be measured in future evaluation research.