Assessing Community Violence: The Children's Report of Exposure to Violence

• NCJ Number: 170912
• Journal: Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Volume: 34 Issue: 2 Dated: (February 1995) Pages: 201-208
• Author(s): M R Cooley; S M Turner; D C Beidel
• Date Published: 1995
• Length: 8 pages
• Grant Number(s): MH42884
• Sponsoring Agency: National Institute of Mental Health
• Publication Format: Article
• Publication Type: Report (Study/Research)
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This report describes the development and initial psychometric evaluation of the Children's Report of Exposure to Violence (CREV), an easy-to-administer self-report inventory for assessing exposure to community violence.

Abstract

The CREV was developed because of the need for a psychometrically sound and comprehensive self-report measure of children's exposure to community violence. Although several self- report instruments currently exist, each has one or more deficiencies, including lack of comprehensiveness, difficult scoring procedures, and cumbersome, time-consuming methods of administration. In addition, assessing the frequency of community violence is a necessary first step for the development of studies that address the role of exposure to violence on subsequent emotional adjustment. Further, none of the existing inventories have acceptable published psychometric features to recommend their use. The CREV can be administered in groups as well as individually in a variety of settings (e.g., schools, clinics, home). Administration takes approximately 20 minutes in groups and 10 minutes individually. The inventory provides data on frequency of exposure to violence and is easily scored. The psychometric evaluation of CREV involved its administration to 228 school children between the ages of 9 and 15 years old. A subset (n = 42) was retested 2 weeks later. Findings show that the CREV has good test-retest reliability, internal consistency, and construct validity. Analyses performed by race and gender showed no difference in frequency of exposure to community violence as assessed by the CREV. This initial report suggests that the CREV has promise as a self-report questionnaire, and its construction is a significant advance in the development of psychometrically sound instruments for use in community-violence research. 5 tables and 30 references