Emotional impact of children's exposure to community violence: A preliminary study

OBJECTIVE: To use multiple methods and measures to investigate preliminarily the emotional impact of children's exposure to community violence. METHOD: Thirty-seven schoolchildren between the ages of 7 and 12 years were categorized into groups with "high" or "low" frequency of exposure. RESULTS: Differing levels of exposure to community violence did not appear to have an impact on DSM-III-R diagnoses. Exposure to high levels of community violence was not related to internalizing behavior and disorders, but rather was associated with externalizing behavior. CONCLUSIONS: There appears to be an adverse relationship between high levels of exposure to community violence and emotional and conduct problems. Vicarious learning serves as an explanatory construct for these findings. VioLit summary: OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study by Cooley-Quille et al. was to examine the impact of community violence on children. METHODOLOGY: The authors employed a quasi-experimental, cross-sectional analysis design. Data were collected from 51 children in grades 4-7 attending elementary and middle schools in urban and rural areas in South Carolina. Subjects were categorized according to whether they had been exposed to low or high levels of violence in their communities. The authors reported that this resulted in a subsample of 37 subjects. The authors utilized a variety of measures to determine the effects of community violence on the subjects. These included the Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia for School-Age Children Present Episode, a semi-structured clinical interview designed to derive DSM-III-R diagnoses, plus a series of self report measures. Self report instruments included the Children's Depression Inventory (Kovacs, 1985), the Fear Survey Schedule for Children-Revised (Windle & Lerner, unpublished), the Child Behavior Checklist (Achenbach & Edelbrock, 1979), the Family Environment Scale (Moos & Moos, 1974), and the Children's Report of Exposure to Violence (CREV) (Cooley et al., 1995). The authors reported that the CREV was developed to measure children's exposure to community violence. This measure consisted of 32 items. Twenty-nine of these items assessed lifetime frequency of exposure to different forms of community violence (e.g., media, hearsay, direct witness or direct experience of stranger, familiar persons, and self victimization). Violent situations included being chased or threatened, beaten, robbed or mugged, shot, and stabbed or killed. Three additional open-ended questions were directed at eliciting information on violent incidences not previously included in the questionnaire. There was a two week test-retest reliability of r=.75 for the CREV, and cronbach's alpha was .78. Categorization of children's exposure to community violence was achieved by using the upper (high community violence exposure) and lower (low community violence exposure) quartiles of total CREV scores. Twenty-three children from the 37 families were categorized as having experienced high or low exposure to different forms of violence. FINDINGS/DISCUSSION: The authors found that the high exposure group was significantly older than the low exposure group (t[35]=2.54, p High community violence exposure was inversely related to social competence in interpersonal functioning (r=-.53, p=.03). There was an association between externalizing behaviors and reported community violence exposure (r=.44, p=.06). The authors found no significant relationship between low exposure to community violence and emotional distress. The authors discovered that among those children who were administered the Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia for School Age Children Present Episode instrument (23 children) only two children who had been exposed to high levels of community violence met diagnostic criteria for psychiatric disorder (e.g., adjustment disorder with depressed mood, simple phobia). Two children in the low violence exposure group also met diagnostic criteria (e.g., attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, social phobia). The authors concluded that consistent with previous literature, children exposed to high levels of community violence were significantly more likely to exhibit impaired social relationships, increased restlessness and general activity, and some measure of externalized behavior problems. Further, the families of these children were shown to experience higher levels of conflict and lower levels of cohesiveness. AUTHORS' RECOMMENDATIONS: The authors suggested that future research should focus on chronic and severe community violence. Further, clinicians should be concerned about the effects of community violence on children's externalizing problem behavior. (CSPV Abstract - Copyright © 1992-2007 by the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence, Institute of Behavioral Science, Regents of the University of Colorado) South Carolina Child Witness Exposure to Violence Community Violence Effects Witnessing Community Violence Witnessing Violence Effects Child Adjustment Middle Childhood Late Childhood Elementary School Student Urban Youth Urban Environment Urban Violence Psychological Victimization Effects Language: en