Blending Methodological Commitments: Narrative Inquiry and Intersectionality in Responding to the Challenges of IPV Research

Background Intimate partner violence (IPV) presents distinct methodological and ethical challenges which demand approaches that can hold complexity while remaining accountable to survivors’ safety and agency. Aim This paper aims to justify and advance a blended approach that responds to the unique methodological, ethical, and relational demands of IPV research. Methods Drawing on a narrative inquiry into women’s resistance to IPV, conducted within an intersectional and trauma- and violence-informed analytical frame, this paper traces a reflexive methodological process through which four core commitments were generated. These include being power conscious, considering contextual and temporal awareness, engaging in intersectional analysis, and cultivating reflexivity and positionality, and illustrates their application. Results This reflexive process yielded four practice-derived methodological commitments that demonstrate how integrating narrative inquiry’s attention to lived experience over time and place with intersectionality’s analysis of intersecting structures of oppression can guide recruitment, interviewing, analysis, and representation in ways that address safety, coercive control, and structural constraints while supporting layered, survivor-led narratives. The vignette and practice examples show how enacting these commitments can disrupt traditional power hierarchies, enhance contextual and temporal sensitivity, and operationalize intersectional analysis in IPV research. Implications These practice-derived commitments offer IPV researchers a concrete, practice-oriented methodological roadmap for designing power-conscious, trauma- and violence-informed studies that better align with survivors’ realities, strengthen ethical rigor, and inform survivor-centered interventions and policies. More broadly, they contribute to qualitative methodology by demonstrating how a narrative inquiry–intersectional blend can be mobilized to address complex, high-risk research contexts.