Predicting School Violence

The purpose of this paper is to examine the literature on factors that predict school violence, and formulate three hypotheses about these predictors for testing using a developed questionnaire and interview methods with a relevant target population. The proposed research will consist of two groups: (1) high school students identifying themselves as angry and likely to commit violent acts; and (2) high school students identifying themselves as not angry or fearful about committing violent acts. It should be noted that this operationalization of violent and non-violet students has been used in other studies (e.g., Silver, Field, Sanders & Diego, 2000). All students at a large metropolitan school will be given the questionnaire and, based on their responses, certain students will be selected out for interviews in which they will be asked more in depth questions about their responses.

It should be noted that the topic of school violence is very relevant to social work practice. This is because of the serious consequences associated with school violence for not only students but their families and others in the community. In this regard, the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Justice Programs' Bureau of Justice Statistics (2005) reports that in 2003 alone, students between the ages of 12-18 years were victims of 88,000 serious and violent crimes. Given these figures, it seems reasonable to state that understanding the factors that increase (or decrease) students' risk f

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vented by after school programs. This claim is supported by an extensive review of the research on after school programs conducted by Quinn (1999) which concluded, based on this review, that participation in after school programs significantly decreases student involvement in activities that are at high risk for violence. This finding is supported by research conducted by DeAngelis (2001) who conducted interviews with 800 teenagers involved in 120 various after school programs in 34 different cities. According to DeAngelis, interview data indicated that students felt that after school programs provide them with learning, growth, structure, and safety and that they kept them out of trouble. In other words, teens themselves perceive after school programs as an important part of youth/school/violence prevention. Thus, it appears that after school programs have a very positive influence on school violence and students perceive this as so. This leads to the formulation of the second research hypothesis which is: Hypothesis 2: Kids who participate in 'fter school programs are less likely to commit school violence than kids who don't participate. This hypothesis will be testing using questionnaire item 3. Specifically, angry/vio

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