NCJ Number
183661
Journal
Sociological Spectrum Volume: 20 Issue: 3 Dated: July-September 2000 Pages: 291-324
Date Published
2000
Length
34 pages
Annotation
This study addresses the reasons for school-based weapon carrying across three diverse county-level contexts.
Abstract
The data used for the estimation of adolescent school-related weapon-carrying came from the Kentucky Youth Survey, which is an ongoing data-collection project that targets students in grades 6-12 throughout Kentucky. The survey was designed to question students about a broad range of smoking, drinking, drug-taking, and other delinquent behaviors, as well as family background, attitudes toward school, involvement in school victimization and violence, peer behaviors, and religious attitudes. The current study focused on the survey data collected during spring 1996. Data from students in three counties were isolated. The three counties reflected important regional socioeconomic differences. The final sample sizes for the three counties were 1,460, 1,226, and 1,322. Weapon possession at school was measured with a dichotomous variable that indicated whether sampled students reported having taken a weapon to school within the 30 days preceding the survey. The independent variables used represented concepts from several of the competing theoretical explanations for adolescent weapon carrying reviewed in the theoretical section of this paper. Findings indicate that few differences existed across the three counties regarding the etiology of school-based weapon-carrying. Regardless of community context, peer weapon-carrying as well as criminal lifestyle were important predictors of adolescents' taking weapons to school. 4 tables and 69 references