Violent Incidents Among Selected Public School Students in Two Large Cities of the South and the Southern Midwest, 1995: [United States]

This study of violent incidents among middle- and
high-school students focused not only on the types and frequency of
these incidents, but also on their dynamics -- the locations, the
opening moves, the relationship between the disputants, the goals and
justifications of the aggressor, the role of third parties, and other
factors. For this study, violence was defined as an act carried out
with the intention, or perceived intention, of physically injuring
another person, and the "opening move" was defined as the action of
a respondent, antagonist, or third party that was viewed as beginning
the violent incident. Data were obtained from interviews with 70 boys
and 40 girls who attended public schools with populations that had
high rates of violence. About half of the students came from a middle
school in an economically disadvantaged African-American section of a
large southern city. The neighborhood the school served, which
included a public housing project, had some of the country's highest
rates of reported violent crime. The other half of the sample were
volunteers from an alternative high school attended by students who
had committed serious violations of school rules, largely involving
illegal drugs, possession of handguns, or fighting. Many students in
this high school, which is located in a large city in the southern
part of the Midwest, came from high-crime areas, including public
housing communities. The interviews were open-ended, with the students
encouraged to speak at length about any violent incidents in school,
at home, or in the neighborhood in which they had been involved. The
110 interviews yielded 250 incidents and are presented as text files,
Parts 3 and 4. The interview transcriptions were then reduced to a
quantitative database with the incident as the unit of analysis
(Part 1). Incidents were diagrammed, and events in each sequence were
coded and grouped to show the typical patterns and sub-patterns in
the interactions. Explanations the students offered for the
violent-incident behavior were grouped into two categories: (1)
"justifications," in which the young people accepted responsibility
for their violent actions but denied that the actions were wrong, and
(2) "excuses," in which the young people admitted the act was wrong
but denied responsibility. Every case in the incident database had at
least one physical indicator of force or violence. The
respondent-level file (Part 2) was created from the incident-level
file using the AGGREGATE procedure in SPSS. Variables in Part 1
include the sex, grade, and age of the respondent, the sex and
estimated age of the antagonist, the relationship between respondent
and antagonist, the nature and location of the opening move, the
respondent's response to the opening move, persons present during the
incident, the respondent's emotions during the incident, the person
who ended the fight, punishments imposed due to the incident, whether
the respondent was arrested, and the duration of the incident.
Additional items cover the number of times during the incident that
something was thrown, the respondent was pushed, slapped, or spanked,
was kicked, bit, or hit with a fist or with something else, was beaten
up, cut, or bruised, was threatened with a knife or gun, or a knife or
gun was used on the respondent. Variables in Part 2 include the
respondent's age, gender, race, and grade at the time of the
interview, the number of incidents per respondent, if the respondent
was an armed robber or a victim of an armed robbery, and whether the
respondent had something thrown at him/her, was pushed, slapped, or
spanked, was kicked, bit, or hit with a fist or with something else,
was beaten up, was threatened with a knife or gun, or had a knife or
gun used on him/her.

Tags: crime-in-schools, juvenile-offenders, middle-schools, neighborhoods, public-housing, school-violence, schools, urban-crime
Organization: Department of Justice