## 2 Our Project
### The Research Phase  
* _Recruitment_  
The aim of the research phase was to gather the experiences of domestic abuse survivors, the police, and the IDVAs. We set out to recruit service providers (which included representation from the police and IDVAs) and domestic abuse survivors, who could provide personal experiential perspectives on the pathway for accessing and receiving help. Domestic abuse survivors were eligible to participate if they had experienced domestic abuse within the past 24 months. We aimed to include a diverse range of perspectives. We used purposive sampling to pursue this. In the case of service providers, purposive sampling allowed us to ensure that we included participants with a wide range of roles. In  
Figure 1: Overview of the EBCD project. the case of service users, we included participants with a range of ethnic backgrounds, and with a range of differing relationships to the perpetrator. Domestic abuse survivors were recruited via gatekeepers from domestic abuse support organizations and the police force in the city. Service providers were eligible to participate if they were involved as a professional in a service provided by a support organization or the police force of the county this project was conducted for. The service providers were recruited with the assistance of the members of the steering group, who were involved in the services provided by either the police or the domestic abuse organizations. * _Data collection_ We conducted either semi-structured face-to-face individual interviews or focus group discussions, in English, with our participants. Most of them were carried out by the authors, but a small number were carried out with support from master's students. Both the interviews and the focus groups were open-ended data collection events, facilitated by an interviewer drawing on a set of exploratory questions in a topic guide. The questions in the topic guide were generated by consulting with representatives of all stakeholders at the steering group. Thus, we prepared schedules of open-ended questions to explore participants' experiences of the help-seeking process, and we employed these flexibly, following established standards for semi-structured approaches to qualitative data collection [21]. Data collection lasted 14 months; the service users were interviewed during an eight-month period within that window. We continued to try to recruit service users for the remaining period of four months but were unable to increase our sample size. It proved to be challenging to recruit survivors for the project due to the vulnerability of the survivors and potentially changes in the circumstances of survivors who showed initial interest in participating. The interviews lasted 41-121 min. Focus groups lasted approximately two hours. All of the interviews and focus groups were audio-recorded in full and transcribed verbatim. * _Participants_ Six survivors (five women; one man), participated in this phase of the project. All the survivors were parents, had received services from an organization which supports domestic abuse survivors, and had suffered from multiple incidents of abuse. The abuse had occurred within a context of a heterosexual relationship. Twenty-two police participants took part across ten individual interviews and three focus groups, including seven senior police officers. They included: initial response police officers, non-urgent and urgent call handlers, force contact management, dispatch and resource allocation staff, offender management, specialist police officers working for the Public Protection Unit who investigate domestic abuse offences, and those involved in policy and strategy related to domestic abuse. Three IDVAs, all women, participated across one individual interview and one group discussion. One IDVA was a court IDVA. A fourth, male participant, was a service delivery officer. For the purposes of brevity, we will refer to them as IDVAs.