Structure and ideology of shelters for battered women

Recent literature concerning battered women's shelters includes untested suggestions that shelters can be categorized by their ideological differences and that their ideologies predict their organizational structures. However, widely accepted principles of organizational theory predict that older shelters would have a different structure than newer shelters. Some of the presumed consequences of organizational age conflict with the structural characteristics presumably demanded by certain shelter ideologies. In the present study both ideology and organizational age were studied as predictors of shelter organization's structure. A nationwide survey of 111 shelters provided the data. Feminist versus other ideologies were associated with a distinctive pattern of priorities for the shelters. However, organizational age was found to be more important than ideology in predicting structural variables.