Research Highlights: Stopping Violence Before It Starts. Identifying Early Predictors of Adolescent Violence

摘要

The nation's young people are increasingly affected by violence, both as its perpetrators and as its victims. Many violence prevention programs aim to reverse this trend, but few of these programs have been rigorously evaluated, and even fewer have been shown to work. To devise better programs, researchers need more information about what causes young people to become violent- specifically, they need to learn whether there are things about young adolescents' personalities and the environments in which they live that promote or inhibit violent behavior later on. Such information could provide the tools for parents, teachers, youth workers, and others to recognize the young adolescents who are most likely to become violent in the future and select these individuals for improved intervention programs. To that end, a RAND research team led by Phyllis Ellickson identified 'early predictors' of violence-personality traits, demographic characteristics, social influences, and behaviors in early adolescence that increase the likelihood of engaging in violent behavior a few years later. The researchers followed nearly 4,500 students from a wide range of communities in California and Oregon. As seventh-graders the students filled out a questionnaire that asked them to describe their lives and environments; five years later the same young people (now high school seniors or dropouts) completed a second questionnaire, this time detailing their involvement with violence. From the two sets of responses, the researchers distilled characteristics of seventh-graders and their environments that consistently led to violence a few years later.