| Seongeun Kim
University of California, Los Angeles
Prevention of school violence and crime: Investigation of cross-level interaction effects of risk and protective factors on adolescent violence and crime using multilevel longitudinal methods
FINAL REPORT
School crime has emotional, educational, and psychological impact on students. Many schools have suffered from school violence/crime with a deleterious effect on learning. Violence disrupts the school environment and creates an environment where students can not learn and teachers can not teach. Dynamic effects of student- and school-level risk and protective factors on school crime and student victimization need to be investigated extensively. Data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study was utilized in the current study. Multilevel modeling, which is a statistical method developed to deal with data containing an inherent hierarchical structure, was used for the analysis of data.
The results showed that adolescent victimization was affected by self, parent and school-related factors. At the student level, parental control, educational aspiration and self concept worked as protective factors that provide guard against adolescent victimization, whereas adolescent misbehavior, absence from school, and time spent after school with no adult present worked as risk factors. At the school level, the availability of behavioral counseling service worked as a protective factor. A school level variable, the percentage of minority students worked interactively with the student level variables of educational aspiration in a negative way. The negative effect of the student level risk factor, absence from school on victimization was further accelerated due to interactions with a school level variable, the degree of subsistence use at school. A school level variable, action for the first occurrence of problem behavior interacted with a student level variable of misbehavior, reducing the negative effect of misbehavior on victimization.
This study identified cross-level interaction effects among risk and protective factors about adolescent victimization at school. Consequently, a prevention program needs to consider the issues of dynamic interactions among individual level characteristics and school level contextual characteristics.
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