(..cont)
An advisory committee was struck in the beginning of this
study, consisting of two staff members from HFMHA and CFLSMT,
a board member of HFMHA, the researcher, and a research
assistant. Focus group interview was adopted as the research
means to collect information from the women.
Women with
disabilities were recruited from both the Chinese and Korean
communities through the help of service providers, community
members and research participants.
Eventually, six focus
groups were held with twenty women participated. Thirteen
of them were Chinese and seven were Korean. Demographically,
participants of this study were born in four different places
of the world: China (40%), Hong Kong (20%), Korea (35%),
and Vietnam (5%).
About 90% of them had been in Canada for
more than six years. While 95% of these individuals spoke
a mother tongue other than English, 40% of them were able
to speak intermediately fluent or fluent English.
In terms
of their age range, the younger one was in her early twenties
whereas the older one was in her late sixties.
Most women
were in their forties whereas there were a few others in
their thirties or fifties.
About half of the women were
either divorced or separated at the time of this study,
a quarter of them remained married and the rest were either
widowed or never married.
70% of the participants had one
or more children. More than one-third of the women possessed
post-secondary school education, one-third had secondary
school education and the rest only had primary school education.
Because of their disabilities and experiences with violence,
slightly more than half of them were welfare and/or disability
subsidy recipients.
Others either lived on a regular income,
alimony and child support, or otherwise. As a result, most
women in this study lived under or at the border of the
poverty line.
A systemic and thorough analysis was performed
to separate the emerging themes from the aggregated data.
These themes were: the faces of disability, the faces of
violence, violence intersects disability, coping strategies,
support systems, experiences with external help, internal
barriers, external barriers, turning points, and needs and
wishes.
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