Despite the decline in homicide rates over the last twenty years, youth violence remains a significant public health issue which disproportionately affects young people of color and is often found at higher rates in urban, disadvantaged neighborhoods. To advance prevention efforts it is important to consider factors beyond the individual such as neighborhood and societal factors that influence youth development. Furthermore, input on neighborhood level factors from members of communities that experience high rates of youth violence can provide unique insight into community life and culture as well as engage communities in prevention efforts. The purpose of this project was to demonstrate a measurement development process that includes community participation and through that process, establish a measure that captures neighborhood social processes that may influence youth behavior as a local urban, disadvantaged community has described them. Previous community based participatory research (CBPR) efforts have identified a concept "neighborhood youth support" as important to youth violence prevention. Guided by principles of CBPR, the current study employed a mixed methods design to develop a measure of this concept. Results of a comprehensive review of social support concepts were used to identify constructs, measures and quality of the measures for the purpose of operationalizing "neighborhood youth support". Next a draft instrument and instructions for the instrument were created. This instrument was then assessed for content validity using a participatory research approach that engaged a community expert panel to review, revise and approve the final instrument for testing in the community. The measure was piloted with a convenience sample of community residents (N=65) and subsequently analyzed for internal consistency reliability and construct validity. Eleven community members and three academic researchers participated on the panel. The final measure consisted of 25 questions in five sub-scales: leadership, respect, intervening in negative behavior, adult presence, and active engagement in positive behavior. Results showed the individual scales to be internally consistent (alpha .626-.783). Principal axis factoring concluded that three of the five scales were measuring one domain while two others were not as clear. Spearman correlations showed moderate to strong positive correlations between these scales and already established scales thought to work similarly as the new scales. Results showed that the measure had good internal consistency and behaved as predicted in comparison to previously validated measures. Moreover, it was established that partnering with community members in measurement development is feasible. This study will help to inform future participatory projects by providing community and academic partnerships with a process for including community voice in measurement development. Finally, the results of this study could help future prevention efforts by providing academic and community researchers with a more nuanced measurement tool and a better understanding of community social processes. / Public Health

The purpose of this study was to examine how extracurricular activities and parental monitoring relate to rural youth violence. Gender differences were examined across all of the study variables. Self-report data were collected from 235 teenagers from a rural, ethnically diverse, Virginia community. Correlations revealed a significant inverse relationship between church activity as well as parental monitoring and weapon carrying. Significant mean level differences existed between males and females on the following variables: time spent in aerobic exercise activities, time spent in toning exercise activities, weapon carrying frequency, and level of parental monitoring. In addition, time in non-school clubs was the best predictor of sample youth classification in either the "violent" category or "nonviolent" category. Findings emphasize the importance of parental monitoring for youth as well as the need for more programs and after-school activities to meet the needs of all youth. / Master of Science

Youth violence in the Baton Rouge inner-city area continues to create heightened concerns for the communities as well as the financial and healthcare systems. Even though violence prevention programs are in place in the area, no decline has been recorded in those who are being affected by violence. Due to lack of research in this field, a need for a sound research study exists to understand how Youth Peace Olympics (YPO) community-based program may be related to changes in attitudes about aggression and violence. A correlational cross-sectional research design was used to evaluate participants' beliefs about aggression, measured using the Normative Beliefs about Aggression instrument by the organization at the beginning and end of the summer program, in addition to secondary data that was provided to me (n=50). Social cognitive theory and the social development model were used as the theoretical framework for the study. Results showed a statistically significant decrease in retaliation approval of aggression scores (pretest M = 2.24, posttest M = 1.91; t[49] = 4.07, p =.000) and marginal statistically significant decrease in general approval of aggression scores (pretest M = 1.48, posttest M = 1.31; t[49] = 1.96, p = .055). Age, gender, and ethnicity were not found to be related to pretest attitudes or pretest/posttest changes in attitudes regarding retaliation approval or general approval of aggression at statistically significant levels. The potential for positive social change is to provide researchers and community-level stakeholders with preliminary program evaluation data related to attitudes about aggression/violence approval.

No description available.

This thesis investigates the practices and compositions of gangs in Greater Manchester, England. Primarily drawing from qualitative data gathered in two adult, men's prisons, it explores gang members' activities, how these practices develop on 'the street', and how they are later affected by imprisonment. The thesis also explores the links between race, geographical area and gang affiliation, analysing how a gang member's racial background and area of origin may relate to his gang. The results show the strong influence of gangs at the sample prisons, and how gangs affect the ways in which prisoners negotiate the carceral space: violent practices, gang allegiances and rivalries developed on 'the street' are regularly transplanted into prison. These high levels of gang 'importation' into the sample prisons result in the social and cultural significance of street gangs often penetrating prison walls. Area of origin and shared racial background are strong unifying 'banners' under which many prison gangs operate, and violence is an integral part of life in 'the gang'. However, reflecting the academic literature, gang members often contest the terminology around 'gangs', showing the polarized discourse around these topics. The thesis attempts to resolve some of these debates by presenting a comprehensive gang typology shaped by theory and prisoners' testimonies.

This thesis explores the desistance promoting potential of professional relationships between male youth workers and young men involved in violence. It adopts a psychosocial methodological and analytic frame to examine a common-sense proposition: that male workers who are colloquially described as 'down with the kids' are especially well suited to engage and mentor young men involved in violence. Five intensely observed longitudinal case studies follow the trajectories of young men and their youth workers over six years. Each case utilises different conceptual tools to offer different insights into their relationships, including: the presence of gendered, generational and unconscious dynamics between young men and male workers; how reciprocal identification can lead to male youth workers not seeing how young men neutralise their violent offending; worker reflexivity as a pre-requisite of the youth work role in late modernity and how this can be fractured by the biographical experiences of too-wounded healers; the importance of male workers with resources of street-social and masculine capital creating a third space where they and young men can examine their own intersectional identities, and; how worker self-disclosure can shift doer done-to dynamics within professional relationships and organisations. The thesis concludes that the male worker as mentor and role model discourse generates both assets and potential shortcomings in terms of desistance promotion. Embodying a 'down with the kids' worker subjectivity can provide a ready route into youthful, masculine subcultures and a means for male workers to meet their own need for generativity. But without proper training and supervision there is a risk that workers with their own history of offending can be ineffective at best, and at worst descend into professional burn-out. In this sense being down with the kids can lead inadvertently to workers going down with the kids. Reconceptualising youth work relationships incorporating psychodynamic and post structural perspectives (i.e. as psychosocial) offers a way to work through these issues productively and can usefully inform youth work practice and policy.

No description available.

No description available.

Youth violence is a pervasive and ongoing public health concern. Based on the paradigm of resilience, the purpose of this quantitative study was to test the relationship between prolonged (3 or more hours) of non-school related media use and youth violence. Secondary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were utilized for this study. Logistic and multiple regression models were used to test whether exposure to prolonged non-school related media (video games and TV) use was associated with violent behavior, and whether there was a relationship between prolonged exposure to non-school related media use and electronic bullying among urban youth (N = 1228). Prolonged exposure to both types of non-school related media use was associated with violent behavior (carrying a weapon, physical fighting, perpetrating physical bullying), and playing video and computer games 3 or more hours per day was positively associated with electronic bullying. However, 3 or more hours of TV viewing per day was not associated with electronic bullying. Policy makers, constituents, and parents may benefit from a greater understanding of media exposure and urban youth violence. The knowledge gained from this study may promote positive social change within family systems by increasing parental awareness of what youth do in their unstructured free time and how this impacts subsequent behaviors. Public health professionals, community organizations, and social service agencies in urban communities could incorporate the results to create a culture that supports youth leadership programs that focus on limited use of non-school related media and on violence prevention.

This study was conducted to explore the relationship between social support and youth violence by testing the relationships between violence victimization, violence exposure, violence perpetration, delinquency, and the moderating variable of social support for rural female adolescents in the United States. This research, guided by the social disorganization theory, involved analyses of data from Wave 3 of the National Survey for Children's Exposure to Violence. The logistic regression analyses (n = 278; female; rural area; mean age 13.5) showed no moderating effect of social support on youth violence perpetration. However, there was a positive association between delinquency and violence perpetration, and a relationship between violence victimization in the forms of child maltreatment, exposure to peer victimization, exposure to sibling victimization, exposure to family violence, witnessing violence, and indirect victimization and violence perpetration. The research contributes to positive social change by providing more evidence about the gender-specific needs of rural adolescent females. This evidence may be used in the development of sustainable violence prevention programs and other services designed to prevent child maltreatment and other forms of violence exposure and victimizations, and subsequent violence perpetration.