Randomized Violence Prevention Trial with Comparison: Responses by Gender

• NCJ Number: 219036
• Journal: Journal of School Violence Volume: 6 Issue: 1 Dated: 2007 Pages: 65-81
• Author(s): James P. Griffin Jr.; Dungtsa Chen; Adriane Eubanks; Katrina M. Brantley; Leigh A. Willis
• Date Published: 2007
• Length: 17 pages
• Publication Format: Article
• Publication Type: Program/Project Evaluation
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This article reports on the evaluation of a three-group, school-based violence prevention program.

Abstract

The evaluation provided partial support for the effectiveness of a cognitive-behavioral curriculum-based and cultural enrichment approach for reducing violence in a school setting, provided that complementary intervention methods are also used at the same site. The effectiveness of the whole-school intervention was questionable when used alone without the other element of cognitive-behavioral intervention. Females in the study may have responded more favorably to the intervention than their male peers, although this finding depended on the analytical design used in the evaluation. The greater effectiveness of the combined approach for African-American females was an unexpected finding, being inconsistent with previous studies that involved participants with multiple racial/ethnic characteristics. One of the prevention strategies used involved a whole-school intervention. Teachers were offered two professional development workshops during the first year of the intervention and four workshops in the second year. A primary emphasis of the training was to promote use of workshop information in the classroom by encouraging adherence to the classroom management techniques and models described during the training. A second group was exposed to both the whole-school intervention and cognitive-behavioral and cultural enrichment training. A third group received no violence-prevention interventions. The researchers used random assignment at the intervention school and a convenience sample at a comparison middle school in order to evaluate three experimental conditions. In part one of the analysis of groups I and II, 356 survey responses were from females and 234 survey responses were from males; all students were in the sixth and seventh grades. Part two of the analysis included 198 surveys from females and 93 surveys from males, all of whom were seventh and eighth graders. 2 tables, 3 figures, and 34 references