Albert D. Farrell - US grants

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This project was designed to provide the developmental work needed to improve the contextual relevance and ecological validity of violence prevention programs for urban adolescents. The need for this effort became evident during the development of a universal school-based intervention called Responding in Peaceful and Positive Ways (RIPP). This intervention was designed to teach the social, cognitive, and emotional skills adolescents need to address problem situations effectively. Although evaluations of RIPP have been encouraging, the effectiveness of this program and similar interventions could be improved by a better understanding of the problem situations faced by urban adolescents, the strategies most likely to be effective in those situations, and factors that inhibit or facilitate their use. Because previous research has focused on male adolescents with severe behavior problems and those in institutional settings, work is needed to identify the skills relevant to more general populations of adolescents living in high risk environments. This project involves a series of qualitative and quantitative studies conducted with adolescents in an urban school system that serves a high percentage of African American students from low income families. Specific aims are to: (1) identify the problem situations most commonly faced by these adolescents that place them at risk for becoming victims or perpetrators of violence; (2) identify the specific cognitive, behavioral, and emotional skills most effective in helping them use adaptive, non-violent methods to address these situations; (3) identify barriers that prevent successful use of these skills and supports that facilitate their use; (4) examine gender differences to increase the relevance of the intervention for both boys and girls; (5) test a model to validate the findings of the preceding studies; and (6) revise the RIPP intervention so that it addresses the problem situations, skills, barriers, and supports identified by the preceding studies. This project will use a series of focus groups and interviews with adolescents, parents, school staff, and other community members. These data will be used to construct and empirically validate a model of the mediating and moderating variables associated with violence and victimization. Completion of this work will set the stage for subsequent large-scale evaluation studies.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The primary goal of the proposed project is to support a National Academic Center of Excellence in Youth Violence Prevention to develop and evaluate a comprehensive prevention strategy designed to reduce rates of violence among youth in Richmond, Virginia and similar communities across the United States. This goal is consistent with the Department of Health and Human Services'Healthy People 2010 goal of reducing levels of intentional injury associated with youth violence. The project's specific objectives are: (1) To implement a comprehensive youth violence prevention strategy at the community level with the following empirically- supported components: (a) school-based universal and selective interventions for middle school youth, (b) a community intervention designed to provide high quality youth development programs and resources for 10-to- 20 year old youth in high-risk neighborhoods within the community, and (c) a selective family intervention for high-risk youth aged 11-to-17;(2) To evaluate the community-level impact of this comprehensive strategy through continuous collection of data on community-level indicators of youth violence perpetration and victimization using a multiple baseline design with three high-risk communities;(3) To evaluate the effectiveness of each component within this comprehensive strategy by assessing their impact on the risk and protective factors they target;(4) To develop a plan to sustain the intervention in the participating communities and prepare materials to support its dissemination in other communities should it be found effective;and (5) To mentor and provide training to doctoral-level students, postdoctoral fellows and faculty in youth violence prevention. This project focuses on three high-risk communities in the City of Richmond, Virginia. Between 1999 and 2006, the homicide rate among 15-to-24 year olds in Richmond ranged from 50.5 to 108.5 per 100,000 representing more than 5 times to nearly 9 times the national average. Specific communities for this project represent middle school attendance zones for Boushall, Elkhardt, and Thompson middle schools. These communities were selected based on community input and review of surveillance data indicating high rates of violence-related injuries among youth in these communities. Within these communities, violence- related discipline incidents in the middle schools were 35 to 41 per 100 students in the 2008-2009 school year. Rates of emergency department visits for violence-related injuries for youth aged 10-to-24 ranged from 6 to 11 per 1,000 in the past 7 years. Violence-related offenses reported by the Department of Juvenile Justice for youth aged 10-to-19 were 11 per 1,000 in 2009. The project will randomly assign communities within a multiple-baseline design such that the intervention will begin in one of the communities at the end of Year 1, in the second community at the end of Year 2, and will not begin in the third community until after the end of the project. Outcomes include community surveillance data on youth violence-related indicators and surveys of middle school students, a community sample of youth aged 14-to-19, and a selective sample of high risk youth. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Project Narrative Violence-related deaths and injuries among children and adolescents in the United States represent a serious public health problem. The goal of this project is to support a National Academic Center of Excellence in Youth Violence Prevention to implement and evaluate a comprehensive prevention strategy designed to reduce rates of violence among youth in Richmond Virginia. The findings will inform efforts to reduce violence-related deaths and injuries in similar communities across the United States.

PROJECT SUMMARY Adolescents, particularly those growing up in urban communities with high rates of poverty and crime, experience high levels of exposure to violence as both witnesses and victims. Exposure to violence during adolescence has been associated with a host of physical and mental health problems with serious consequences for individuals and society. Prior research has established that youth frequently exposed to violence are more likely to engage in aggressive behavior, but the causal relation between violence exposure and aggression, and the underlying factors that account for this relation have not been clearly established. The goal of this project is to clarify the relation between violence exposure (both witnessing and victimization) and aggressive behavior during adolescence, and to identify mechanisms that account for this relation. This project differs from prior studies that have examined between-person factors that influence trajectories of violent behavior and violence exposure across the life course. Its focus is on time-specific within-person factors (i.e., mediators) within each grade of middle school that influence within-individual (i.e., within-person) changes during early adolescence. Early adolescence is a particularly salient time for such a focus because of the many changes that increase adolescents? risk of exposure to violence, victimization, and aggression. Furthermore, the most common trajectory of antisocial behavior has its onset during adolescence and is related to social processes and peer influences that emerge during this time. Establishing the underlying developmental process is critical both for understanding the etiology of aggressive behavior and for identifying optimal points of intervention to deflect trajectories of problem behavior. This project addresses these goals through secondary analysis of a rich data set from a project that collected data on measures of witnessing violence, victimization, physical aggression, beliefs and values, and delinquent peer associations every 3 months through all 3 years of middle school. Participants were 1,795 adolescents from seven cohorts at three public middle schools in urban communities with high rates of crime and violence. They ranged from 10 to 17 years old (83% African American; 47% male). Each cohort was assessed four times per year for up to 3 years with collateral data from teachers? ratings. Examining changes across these 12 waves will allow us to examine changes both within and across all three years of middle school and during the summers between school years. This project?s specific aims are to: 1) Investigate reciprocal relations between violence exposure and aggression during each grade of middle school. 2) Determine the extent to which beliefs and values mediate the impact of adolescents? exposure to violence on aggressive behavior. 3) Determine the extent to which peer associations mediate the impact of aggression on exposure to violence. These aims will be addressed using recently developed approaches to latent curve modeling that provide more direct and refined tests of hypotheses about both between-person and within-person changes than has previously been possible.