Today we held our first advisory board meeting. Our advisory board members, from across the state and third sector and from across the UK, raised many thought provoking points closely tied to our research agenda.

Among other things, we discussed:

• terminology and the importance of understanding the origins and implications of different terms related to our research, such as domestic abuse, domestic violence, ‘experiences’ versus ‘exposures’ to abuse and more;
• the difficulties in studying perpetrators by using primarily information on victims;
• challenges in estimating under-reporting of domestic abuse in large surveys and ways in which to address these;
• the potential relevance, and also the limitations of the ‘Adverse Childhood Experiences’ (ACEs) framework for our research;
• what constitutes and what contributes to resilience for children living in homes where there is domestic abuse;
• the challenges in using linked school data to understand associations between domestic abuse and school attainment

In the coming months we will be working on these and other analytical challenges as we focus primarily on cleaning and preparing datasets and relevant variables.