Predicting School Violence Essays - Motivation,

Predicting School Violence This is an overview of the types of constructs which one might look at to determine if a student is in a high risk category for acting out in a violent manner, and the types of tests which would measure those constructs. We will look at some of these predictors, the constructs they attempt to measure, and how this might aid in predicting future behavior. There have been a lot of studies, interventions, programs, and models designed to reduce or predict violence among our youth. The strongest predictor being past violent behavior. Most of these studies have been linked to some type of deficiencies in the home environment and school environment. The overwhelming question facing America now is - Why would a student who has almost anything he desires, living in an upper middle class neighborhood, bring a gun to school with the purpose of killing his classmates and teachers? The question for researchers is - Can we predict which students are likely to engage in this type of behavior? The resounding answer so far seems to be negative. There is not any test, inventory, or self-report scale which can tell us which students will act out in this manner. However, reviewing the literature there appears to be different types of measurement when looked at aggregately, might identify those students who would be at higher risk although they do not show a past history of violence and therefore fall outside of the previously researched areas. Some of the things we would hope to assess in identifying violence-related attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors among youths would be broken into three categories: 1. Attitude and Belief Assessments - aggression, couple violence, education and school, employment, gangs, gender roles, television, handguns 2. Psychological and Cognitive Assessments - aggressive fantasies, role models, attributional bias, depression, psychological distress, fatalism, future aspirations, hopelessness, hostility, moral reasoning, perceptions of self, responsibility, self-efficacy, impulse control, self-esteem, empathy, and social consciousness 3. Behavior Assessments - concentration, aggressive behavior, conflict resolution skills, drug and alcohol use, handgun access, leisure activity, parental control, social competence, social problem solving skills, victimization, disciplinary and delinquent behavior. 4. Environmental Assessments - exposure to violence, family environment (adaptability, bonding, cohesion, relationships), quality of life, quality of neighborhood Assessment of Self-Esteem One of the psychological and cognitive assessments we choose to look at is self esteem. Self-esteem has been viewed in different ways. Block and Robins (1993) have viewed it as a global entity: "we view self-esteem as the extent to which one perceives oneself as relatively close to being the person one wants to be and/or as relatively distant from being the kind of person one does not want to be, with respect to person-qualities one positively and negatively values". Self concept theory has stressed that self-esteem is an attitude about oneself as a whole (global self-esteem) as well as one's functioning in specific areas of concern to oneself (specific self-esteem). Relatively little is know concerning relationships between a child's self-esteem and observations of the child's behavior. Most have come to a clinical assumption that children with externalizing behavior suffer from poor self-esteem. The other issue about self-esteem revolves around whether or not it is a stable trait or a fluctuating state. Heatherton and Polivy (1991) referred to the short-lived changes in an individual's self-esteen as "state" self-esteem and developed a scale to measure it called the State Self-Esteem Scale (SSES) which is a 20-item Likert-type scale designed for measuring temporary changes in individual self-esteem. There are three self-esteem factors in the scale: Academic Performance, Social Evaluation, and Appearance. Coefficient Alpha for the scale equals 0.92. Linton (1996) conducted a study to test its validity by comparing it with the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale. It consists of ten items answered on a four point scale from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree". The scale has a Guttman scale reproducibility coefficient of 0.92 and a test-retest correlation of 0.85. Her results showed a significant correlation between self-esteem measures on the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale and four components on the SSES. She demonstrated that SSES measures four distinct components within the state self-esteem construct and provides evidence that there is a fluctuating nature of self-esteem. It also supports the use of the SSES for study within the adolescent populations. Another study by Frankel (1996) compared Piers-Harris Self-Concept Scale(PHS) and the Child Behavior Checklist Inventory (CBCL) with the Pupil Evaluation Inventory (PEI) to get a better understanding of why children with internalizing problems (withdrawal, somatic complaints and sadness) consistently demonstrate low self-esteem, while results of children with externalizing behaviors (aggression, poor impulse control, and non-compliance) have been inconsistent.