Abstract

Scientific information on violence can be difficult to compile and understand. It is scattered across websites, databases, technical reports and academic journals, and rarely addresses all types of violence. The Violence Prevention Information System or Violence Info, aims to improve access to scientific information about the main types and aspects of interpersonal violence, through creating a data repository and displaying the information in a user-friendly format on a website. It covers the prevalence, consequences, risk factors and preventability of: homicide, child maltreatment, youth violence, intimate partner violence, elder abuse, and sexual violence. Violence Info has three primary sources of data: 1. Published scientific studies, primarily data extracted from systematic reviews and, in areas poorly covered by them, from single studies. 2. WHO Global Health Estimates provide global, regional and national homicide rates. 3. The WHO Global status report on violence prevention 2014 provides information on countries national actions plans, social and educational policies, specific laws, prevention programmes, and services for victims. The data repository currently contains almost 13 000 individual data points, from over 3 500 single studies. As the vision for Violence Info was to provide an overview on all aspects of several different forms of violence, traditional meta-analyses techniques for searching, extracting and synthesising data had to be adopted and refined to cope with the scale of the literature which met the criteria for inclusion in the data repository. This presentation will provide an overview of the methodological development of Violence Info to date. Considerations will also be given to the ongoing methodological development of Violence Info.