The results suggest that victims of domestic violence or those with direct experience of abuse have a more difficult time making sense of domestic violence than those who have no firsthand or secondhand experience with the problem. Victims of domestic violence drew mainly on their own lived experiences to understand the problem and tended to engage in interpretative work in order to harmonize their conception of their selves with the abuse they suffered. Nonvictims, on the other hand, relied on a limited range of relationships and sources in order to understand the problem of domestic violence. Nonvictims drew their understanding of domestic violence from less complex media presentations of the problem which tend to simplify domestic violence issues into easily understandable categories. As a result, victims offered more ambiguous and complex narratives of domestic violence while nonvictims offered less nuanced and more straightforward narratives of the problem. Results were based on in-depth interviews with 20 nonacademic staff (11 women and 9 men) at a midwestern university who were recruited using random sampling. Interviews focused on participants’ understanding of domestic violence, how they received their knowledge of domestic violence, their opinions of victims and abusers, and solutions to domestic violence. Interviews were transcribed and analyzed for emerging themes. Future research on how people make sense of social problems is encouraged. Notes, references