Sofie Østergaard Jaspers defends her PhD thesis

Title

‘Contextualizing workplace violence prevention - An investigation of prevention approaches and implementation in The Integrated Violence Prevention Study’.

Time and place

Friday, 12 March 2021 at 20:00.

The defence will take place online on Skype.

Click here to attend the defence on Skype through NFA's website.

Assessment committee

  • External lecturer Janne Skakon, University of Copenhagen, Denmark (chair)

  • Professor Judith Arnetz, Michigan State University, United States

  • Professor Anthony D. LaMontagne, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia

Supervisor

  • Associate Professor Paul Conway, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Abstract

Despite decades of violence prevention research, workplace violence continues to be a substantial occupational risk with severe individual, organizational and societal consequences. The overall aim of this thesis was therefore to investigate how to design comprehensive violence prevention efforts and the evaluation of such interventions. The thesis was nested within a larger intervention study of violence prevention (the Integrated Violence Prevention study), which was the point of departure for approaching the aim.  I addressed the aim from different angles, and by doing so, several gaps in the current knowledge in violence prevention were addressed. Firstly, in article I, the design of the process, context and outcome evaluation of the comprehensive Integrated Violence Prevention intervention was presented building extensively on the process evaluation literature from the Organizational Health and Safety field and findings on effective violence prevention and accident prevention. Secondly, in article II, a realist evaluation framework was used to systematically asses the contextual factors influencing the implementation of the comprehensive Integrated Violence Prevention intervention. In article III, the focus was on line managers’ violence preventive practices as these are important for violence prevention, but hitherto understudied. Finally, the thesis presents a revised model for comprehensive violence prevention that integrates the findings from the three articles.