The Evidence Hour: Confronting School Violence and Victimization
Center for Victim Research’s webinar series, The Evidence Hour, showcases a recent systematic review* or meta-analysis about victimization, trauma, or victim services. Each webinar features an author of the research and a practitioner discussant who will review the findings and reflect on what they mean for victim service providers and researchers.
On August 26, Jillian J. Turanovic, PhD and Krista R. Flannigan, J.D. discussed the results from a meta-analysis on the sources of school violence and victimization. The meta-analysis included various forms of aggression and crime within K-12 schools and over thirty different individual, school, and community risk and protective factors. Presenters also discussed promising actions that researchers, practitioners, and advocates can take to advance science and best respond to violence and victimization in schools.
Related Research on sources of school violence and interventions:
- r. Turanovic mentioned this related article: “The victimization of LGBTQ students at school: A meta-analysis” by W. Myers, J. Turanovic, K. Lloyd, & T. Pratt. (2020). Journal of school violence, 19(4), 421-432. (Abstract; contact the librarian for full-text access.)
- “A Group Randomized Trial of School-Based Teen Courts to Address the School to Prison Pipeline, Reduce Aggression and Violence, and Enhance School Safety in Middle and High School Students” by Paul Smokowski, Caroline Evans, Roderick Rose, & Martica Bacallao. (2020). Journal of School Violence. (Abstract; contact the library for full-text). This study builds on previous assessments of Youth Court intervention schools, looking at outcomes after two years of the intervention. This longitudinal study found that teens who attended schools with teen courts reduced their number of delinquent friendships, which is one of the risk factors most strongly associated with school violence in Turanovic et al’s meta-analysis.
- “A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Interventions to Decrease Cyberbullying Perpetration and Victimization” by Joshua Polanin, Dorothy Espelage, and Jennifer Grotpeter. (April 2020) American Institutes of Research and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for the National Institute of Justice. This report summarizes research from multiple studies about how school-based programs that measured cyberbullying impacted perpetration and victimization outcomes. The researchers found that anti-cyberbullying programs reduced both traditional and online bullying. However, the researchers note that traditional anti-bullying programs did not impact online harassment perpetration or victimization. The authors recommended that schools using traditional anti-bullying programs should add in cyberbullying components.
- “School Leaders’ Experiences on Dealing with Students Exposed to Domestic Violence” by Berger, Chionh, & Miko. Journal of Family Violence (2021). This Australian study involved interviews with school leaders. Participants discussed student behaviors they believed stemmed from youth witnessing domestic violence. The school leaders also shared their perceptions about their preparedness to interact with families affected by domestic violence and their impressions of trauma-informed training. School leaders also discussed their mixed experiences working with community-based agencies to support students dealing with violence in the home.
Related Resources from our Research2Practice Network:
- CALiO (Child Abuse Library Online): review results for this saved search for research about peer-on-peer violence from 2018-present.
- National Mass Violence Victimization Resource Center: for resources related to how victim service professionals can prepare for mass violence in their communities (including school violence), check out Victim Service Professionals Resources.
What are Systematic Reviews?
- A systematic review is the process of bringing together all available studies about a well-defined question, analyzing the quality of their study methods, and summarizing their findings.
- Systematic reviews often use a statistical practice called meta-analysis. This means combining data from multiple studies, to find patterns and calculate the average effect of the intervention.
- Because systematic reviews pool results from many experiments and rate the methods of each study, these reviews increase our confidence in the quality and consistency of the evidence and what it means for the field.
Basically, systematic reviews take a large amount of information about a complex issue from multiple sources and make that information more manageable and usable. These reviews can also help make sense of conflicting findings from different studies.
Learn more from:
- Quick Reference: Systematic Reviews
- Quick Reference: Tips on Reading Research Articles
Evidence Hour: Confronting School Violence and Victimization
Learn about the results of a large NIJ-funded meta-analysis on the sources of school violence and victimization. This review included various forms of aggression and crime within K-12 schools; and over thirty different individual, school, and community risk and protective factors. Special focus will also be given to the victimization of LGBTQ youth at school. Presenters will discuss the findings and policy implications, along with promising actions that researchers, practitioners, and advocates can take to advance science and best respond to violence and victimization in schools.
Related article: “Individual, Institutional, and Community Sources of School Violence: A Meta-Analysis”
Jillian J. Turanovic, Ph.D. is Associate Professor and Director of the Crime Victim Research and Policy Institute in the College of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida State University. She received her Ph.D. in Criminology and Criminal Justice from Arizona State University in 2015. Her research is rooted in the study of victimization, violence, and correctional policy, and much of her work focuses on youth violent victimization and its consequences. She is the author of Thinking About Victimization: Context and Consequences (Routledge, 2019), and co-editor of Revitalizing Victimization Theory: Revisions, Applications, and New Directions (Routledge, 2021). Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Justice, the Office for Victims of Crime, and Arnold Ventures. She received the 2019 Cavan Young Scholar Award from the American Society of Criminology.
Krista R. Flannigan, J.D. is on the faculty of Florida State University College of Criminology and Criminal Justice and is Co-Director of the Crime Victim Research and Policy Institute. She is an attorney, educator, and advocate experienced in emergency response and disaster management, community collaboration, and program development. She has responded to numerous incidents of mass violence and terrorism, including but not limited to, the Oklahoma City Bombing, Columbine High School shooting, 9/11, the Aurora Theater shooting, the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando and the Route 91 Music Festival in Las Vegas. She has also worked with various communities, including those in Parkland, FL and El Paso, TX to establish long-term services for the victims of the shootings in those areas. Most recently, she supported resiliency efforts in Boulder, CO in response to the grocery shooting. Krista also serves a consultant and conducts national trainings for the Office for Victims of Crime, and she developed a special program in Victim Studies at Florida State University.
Tags: school violence, systematic reviewsLeave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
« PREVIOUS NEXT »
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.