Youth Violence: Measuring Violence-Related Attitudes, Behaviors, and Influences Among Youths: A Compendium of Assessment Tools - Second Edition

This compendium provides researchers and prevention specialists with a set of tools to assess violence-related beliefs, behaviors, and influences, as well as to evaluate programs to prevent youth violence. If you are new to the field of youth violence prevention and unfamiliar with available measures, you may find this compendium to be particularly useful.  If you are an experienced researcher, this compendium may serve as a resource to identify additional measures to assess the factors associated with violence among youths.

Although this compendium contains more than 170 measures, it is not an exhaustive listing of available measures. A few of the more widely used measures to assess aggression in children, for example, are copyrighted and could not be included here. Other measures being used in the field, but not known to the authors, are also not included. Many of the measures included in the first edition of the compendium focused on individual violence-related attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. These types of measures are included in this edition as well and may be particularly useful if you are evaluating a school-based curriculum or a community-based program designed to reduce violence among youths. Several measures to assess peer, family, and community influences have been added to the compendium. Many of these measures are from the major longitudinal and prevention research studies of youth violence being conducted in the United States.

Most of the measures in this compendium are intended for use with youths between the ages of 11 and 24 years, to assess such factors as serious violent and delinquent behavior, conflict resolution strategies, social and emotional competencies, peer influences, parental monitoring and supervision, family relationships, exposure to violence, collective efficacy, and neighborhood characteristics. The compendium also contains a number of scales and assessments developed for use with children between the ages of 5 and 10 years, to measure factors such as aggressive fantasies, beliefs supportive of aggression, attributional biases, prosocial behavior, and aggressive behavior.  When parent and teacher versions of assessments are available, they are included as well.

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