Session: Etiology and Progression of Youth Violence Across Adolescence (Society for Prevention Research 24th Annual Meeting)

Youth violence, which includes a wide swath of behaviors, impacts thousands of young people daily. Indeed, it is the leading cause of death and physical injuries and is attributable to $17.5 in medical bills and lost work each year. Despite the compelling data documenting the public health burden that youth violence represents, important gaps in our understanding of the etiology and progression of youth violence hamper our ability to develop and implement effective intervention and prevention strategies. This symposium showcases data from three national, longitudinal studies to inform our understanding of how different types of youth violence emerge, as well as how they may persist over time.

The first paper, “Latent Transitions in Sexual Violence Perpetration in a nationally representative sample of individuals age 16-22,” presents three different profiles of youth based upon their sexual violence behavior (SV): no SV, primarily sexual harassment, and various types of SV perpetration behaviors. We also present youth’s probability to transition across these profiles from middle to late adolescence.

The second paper, “Peer re-victimization patterns in a national longitudinal sample of youth: Impact on trauma symptomatology and delinquency,” examines how a variety of peer victimization experiences persist for youth from one year to the next, as well as the impact of persistent peer victimization on trauma and delinquency.  

The third paper, “Identifying Mischievous Responders through Latent Class Analysis,” explores the utility of a data-driven approach to identify response bias among youth in a national representative sample who responded to questions on sexual violence perpetration. In addition to presenting results on the prevalence of over-reporting in the sample, salient characteristics will be included to better characterize biased responders. The utility of an explicit measurement model will be explored as well.

The fourth paper, “Profiles of Adolescent Relationship Abuse and Sexual Harassment by age: A latent class analysis,” presents three latent profiles of victimization and perpetration experiences of three subtypes of adolescent relationship abuse and sexual harassment for two age groups, 12-15 and 16-18. Differences in class prevalence as well as class profiles emerged between the two age groups will be discussed. Results highlight the importance of examining SH and subtypes ARA victimization and perpetration concurrently.

At the conclusion of the presentations, we will moderate a discussion with symposium attendees. It is expected that the diversity of types of youth violence and the rigorous methodological methods applied will be appealing to the SPR participants.