Issues and evidence of protective factors
Risk and Direct Protective Factors for Youth Violence: Results from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health

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Background

The majority of studies on youth violence have focused on factors that increase the risk for youth violence.

Purpose

To assess whether determinants of violence operate as risk factors, direct protective factors, or both during adolescence and young adulthood.

Methods

Data from participants in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, aged 13 years at Wave 1, were analyzed. Individual, family, school, peer, and community factors during adolescence (Wave 1 [1995]; age 13 years) were examined as predictors of violence involvement during adolescence (Wave 2 [1996]; age 14 years) and in young adulthood (Wave 3 [2001–2002]; ages 18–20 years).

Results

Twelve percent of participants aged 14 years and 8% of participants aged 18–20 years reported serious violence involvement during the past 12 months. Bivariate analyses revealed risk and direct protective factors for violence at both time points. Risk for violence at age 14 years was increased by earlier attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms, low school connectedness, low grade-point average, and high peer delinquency. Direct protective factors for youth violence at age 14 years included low ADHD symptoms, low emotional distress, high educational aspirations, and high grade-point averages. Bivariate analyses showed a lower risk of violence among youth aged 18–20 years who reported low peer delinquency at age 13 years. Multiple logistic regression analyses predicting violence involvement showed direct protective effects for low ADHD symptoms and low emotional distress at age 14 years, and a direct protective effect for low peer delinquency at ages 18–20 years, after controlling for demographic characteristics.

Conclusions

Findings suggest that violence involvement remains difficult to predict but indicate the importance of assessing both risk and direct protective factors for understanding violent behavior.

Introduction

The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) is a longitudinal study of a nationally representative sample of adolescents (in Grades 7–12 during the 1994–1995 academic year) in the U.S. To date, four in-home interviews have been conducted with this cohort. The interviews were conducted between April and December 1995 (Wave I); April and August 1996 (Wave II); August 2001 and April 2002 (Wave III); and during 2007 and 2008 (Wave IV). At baseline, participants were in Grades 7–12, and during Wave IV participants were aged between 24 and 32 years. Data include potential risk and direct protective factors for youth violence in the individual, peer, family, school, and community domains.

The Add Health data have been used by researchers to understand violence involvement during adolescence and young adulthood. The majority of these papers, however, have focused on factors that increase the risk for youth violence. Resnick and colleagues1 conducted one of the first studies examining risk and protective factors for youth violence using Add Health data. They examined individual, family, and community-related factors at Wave I that predicted violence involvement at Wave II. Protective factors were defined as factors in the lives of young people that diminished or buffered against the likelihood of violence involvement. Risk factors for youth violence at Wave II in this study included perpetrating or experiencing violence, weapon carrying, friend suicidal involvement, problems in school, and higher levels of alcohol and marijuana use at Wave I. Protective factors included family connectedness, high grade-point average, and religiosity.

The present study expands the study by Resnick et al.1 by examining risk and direct protective factors in Wave I for youth violence at Waves II and III. Risk factors were defined as factors in the lives of adolescents that increase the likelihood of violence, whereas direct protective factors decreased the likelihood of violence. The present study includes a range of factors that may increase or decrease the likelihood of youth violence, including characteristics of individual youth, their peers, and their families, as well as school experiences and characteristics of the neighborhood in which they live.

The current study is part of an ongoing research effort supported by the CDC to examine whether determinants of violence operate as risk factors, direct protective factors, or both during adolescence and young adulthood. This effort includes analysis of four longitudinal datasets including the Pittsburgh Youth Study, the Chicago Youth Development Study, the Seattle Social Development Project, and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). Similar risk and direct protective factors were identified in each dataset, and the datasets were analyzed using similar methods. The goal was to identify those factors in the lives of young people that increase or decrease the risk of violence. These analyses fill an important gap in the literature, as few studies have examined risk and direct protective factors for youth violence within a single study and the replicability of factors across studies.

Section snippets

Add Health Study Design and Study Sample

The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health is a school-based longitudinal study of adolescents and young adults (www.cpc.unc.edu/addhealth) in the U.S. High schools across the country were selected randomly from a sampling frame stratified by region, urbanicity, racial composition, and size. The high schools selected were matched with their feeder middle schools. During the 1994–1995 academic year, students from 132 schools completed an in-school paper-and-pencil survey. A subsample

Results

Twelve percent (n=150) of the 1226 participants at age 14 years (Wave 2) and 8% (n=87) of the 1037 participants aged 18–20 years (Wave 3) reported engaging in one or more violent behaviors.

Discussion

The present study examined risk and direct protective factors for violence involvement during adolescence and in young adulthood using a subsample of data from Add Health. Twelve percent of the sample at age 14 years and 8% of the sample aged 18–20 years reported serious violence involvement. Violence may have been less common in the current study because violence involvement was operationalized as engaging in more-severe forms of violence, including pulling a knife or gun, shooting or stabbing

Conclusion

The results of the current study suggest that violence involvement remains difficult to predict. The violence outcomes examined in the present study, specifically, indices of serious violence during adolescence and young adulthood, were not well explained by many of the measures included in this analysis. This suggests the value of measuring more proximal factors not included in this study that nonetheless have demonstrated their predictive power in other analyses: witnessing and experiencing

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