Research article
Effect of the incident at Columbine on students’ violence- and suicide-related behaviors

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Abstract

Background: This study examined the impact that the violent incident at Columbine High School may have had on reports of behaviors related to violence and suicide among U.S. high school students.

Methods: Nationally representative data from the 1999 Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) were analyzed using logistic regression analyses.

Results: Students who completed the 1999 YRBS after the Columbine incident were more likely to report feeling too unsafe to go to school and less likely to report considering or planning suicide than were students who completed the 1999 YRBS before the incident.

Conclusions: These results highlight how an extreme incident of school violence can affect students nationwide.

Section snippets

Study design

This study used data from the 1999 national school-based YRBS. This survey used a three-stage cluster-sample design to obtain a nationally representative sample of students in grades 9 through 12. The target population consisted of all public and private high school students in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Details of the sample design have been described previously.12

Survey procedures were designed to protect student privacy and to allow for anonymous participation. Trained data

Results

We compared by chi-square analyses the distributions of respondents completing questionnaires on or before and after April 20 on gender, grade, race or ethnicity, metropolitan status, and geographic region. Although we found no significant differences (all p >0.2), we controlled for these variables in the subsequent analyses to eliminate any potential confounding.

As shown in Table 1, relative to students who completed the YRBS on or before April 20, those who completed the questionnaire after

Discussion

Although the percentage of students who reported feeling too unsafe to attend school did not increase significantly during the 1990s,14 between 1997 and 1999 it increased 30%, from 4.0% to 5.2%.12 The current study revealed that this increase was associated with data collection timing relative to the Columbine incident. Specifically, the percentage of students who reported feeling too unsafe to attend school before the Columbine incident (3.9%) was nearly identical to the 4.0% of students who

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