University of Illinois Youth Violence Prevention Center

University of Illinois, Chicago
Deborah Gorman-Smith, PhD – Principal Investigator
Institute of Juvenile Research (M/C 747)
Department of Psychiatry
1747 W Roosevelt Rd.
Chicago, IL 60608
debgs@uic.edu
Center website


The University of Illinois, Chicago plans to establish a violence prevention research center that brings together researchers, community representatives, practitioners and policy makers committed to understanding and reducing youth violence in poor, inner-city communities in Chicago—communities with some of the highest rates of youth violence in the country. The core work of the center is guided by the perspective that the most effective way to combat youth violence is to coordinate empirical "pre-intervention" work designed to understand the risk and development of such violence and to rigorously evaluate preventive interventions conducted both under tightly controlled conditions (i.e., randomized control efficacy trials) and in real world settings (i.e., effectiveness trials). Understanding that context is central to the work of the center is meaningful, in that the characteristics of the neighborhood and community are important in both reducing risk of youth violence and developing effective interventions.

The center's primary aims are to bring together researchers, community representatives, practitioners and policy makers to build an integrative approach to address youth violence within poor, inner-city neighborhoods in Chicago. The center will address these issues across developmental periods and with children and families with different levels of risk and involvement in youth violence; promote the use of evidence-based practice to reduce youth violence; develop a comprehensive surveillance system to guide intervention activities and to evaluate changes in youth violence in communities and neighborhoods; provide training and technical assistance to support schools and community agencies in selecting, implementing and evaluating youth violence prevention programs; train new investigators in context-based prevention science; and to disseminate empirical findings regionally and nationally.