Virginia Commonwealth University Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence
Virginia Commonwealth University
Albert Farrell, PhD – Principal Investigator
Department of Psychology
Box 842018
Richmond, VA 23284
afarrell@mail1.vcu.edu
Center Website
Virginia Commonwealth University’s (VCU) national Academic Center of Excellence on youth violence prevention will serve the Richmond community—where violence is a particularly serious problem. The most recent FBI violent crime statistics rank Richmond as the 9th most dangerous city in the U.S. VCU faculty members have been involved in a variety of community-based efforts to address youth violence as part of its mission. The proposed Center would be sponsored by departments from both VCU campuses: Psychology, and Government & Public Affairs on the Monroe Park Campus and Psychiatry, and Preventive
Medicine & Community Health on the Medical Campus. Participating faculty represent a variety of disciplines, including psychology, psychiatry, community health, human development, and nursing.
The Center's mission is to empower youth, schools, families, and other stakeholders to promote the healthy, safe, and otherwise positive development of youth in the defined community from early adolescence through emerging adulthood. This mission will be pursued through the joint activities of the research core and the education and outreach core. The mission, work and logic model of the VCU center are grounded in an ecological framework that addresses multiple levels of influence on child behavior and developmental outcomes.
The Center's research agenda builds on previous work, including a 13-year collaborative effort to develop effective youth violence prevention programs. It is driven by the assumption that current prevention efforts provide an excellent starting point, but that further research is needed to improve the effectiveness of these programs. The Center will accomplish this through an action-research cycle in which current prevention efforts are refined based on relevant research and community input, implemented, and evaluated. Each of the components within the center is designed to inform this process.
Collaborating with the community and collecting surveillance data are considered essential to understanding the nature of the problems and priorities within the local community and for determining the feasibility of various prevention approaches. The research agenda includes core studies and smaller studies designed to provide critical information to guide revisions to current prevention programs. Further research can then be conducted to evaluate their impact. The outreach and education core builds upon and extends previous work supported by an ACE developing center grant funded in 2000. It will
respond more broadly to community requests for information, support, technical assistance, and to bringing together stakeholders [that historically do not work with one another]. Both cores will provide professional development for faculty and education and research experiences for students and community members. These activities are represented in a logic model that specifies the inputs, activities, outputs, and outcomes expected for the Center.
Content Source: National Center for Injury Prevention
and Control, Division of Unintentional Injury
Page last modified:
May 16, 2007