Session: Individual and Contextual Factors Associated with Involvement in Youth Violence (Society for Prevention Research 21st Annual Meeting)

SESSION INTRODUCTION: A clear understanding of the individual and contextual factors associated with youth violence is essential for developing effective prevention programs. The goal of this symposium session is to examine a range of individual and contextual factors that are linked with exposure to and involvement in youth violence among three ethnically diverse samples of adolescents from primarily urban areas. Each of these studies examines slightly different individual and/or contextual factors of relevance to violence prevention efforts for adolescents and all use sophisticated statistical approaches to examine these important relations. The focus of this symposium is in line with the general conference themes of epidemiology and etiology and innovative methods and statistics.

The first paper uses latent class analysis to identify subgroups of adolescents based on patterns of aggression and victimization and to examine class differences in demographic, social-cognitive (e.g., beliefs about aggression) and environmental (e.g., peer support for aggression) factors. Major strengths of this paper include the use of advanced statistics to model sample heterogeneity and the inclusion of individual and contextual factors that have not previously been examined in connection with being a victim of violence (e.g., beliefs that fighting is sometimes necessary).

The second paper uses data from the cohort-wide sample of the Multisite Violence Prevention Project to examine individual ethnicity and the ethnic composition of the school as moderators of the relations between overt and relational victimization and life satisfaction. Major strengths of this paper include the use of schools from diverse geographic environments, and the use of multi-level models that include both individual-level and school-level ethnicity in the same model as previous research has primarily focused only on the impact of individual ethnicity.

The third paper uses data from a high-risk subsample in the Multisite Violence Prevention Project to examine relations among witnessing community violence, experiencing victimization, and aggressive behavior using multilevel models that include influences within the peer, school, and neighborhood contexts. Major strengths of this paper include its examination of the bi-directional relations among exposure to violence as a witness or victim and aggression, and the inclusion of contextual factors at the school and neighborhood levels within the same model.

Finally, a discussant will highlight commonalities among the papers, discuss implications for prevention, and moderate a discussion between the presenters and the audience.