Objective:
Evaluations of community-based violence intervention and prevention (CVIPI) programs almost exclusively examine violence as an outcome of the correlational relationship between an intervention (independent predictor variable) and incidents of violence (dependent variable). As the former increases (in dosage, or moves, dichotomously, from absence (0) to presence (1), the latter is expected to decrease. Presumably exogenous factors are simply controlled for, statistically isolated and considered separable from the main relationship. We propose a set of
baseline studies to quantify factors within a program’s social ecology expected to influence the basic predictor-outcome relationship. We expect community norms towards violence, operational stability of a program, and the political and ideological context in which it operates
to moderate this relationship. Moreover, we hypothesize that individual-level norm change happens, at least in part, as a result of community norm change; that programs’ effectiveness occurs because of their operational stability; and that operational stability occurs as a result of political and ideological support from local governments and constituencies. Thus, we propose moderation and mediation relationships not previously accounted for in most violence prevention evaluations. The proposed study would test these assumptions through cross-sectional comparison, while establishing data collection capable of being used for subsequent longitudinal analyses.
Funded By:
New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center
Project Status:
In progress
Principal Investigator (PI):
Kwan-Lamar Blount-Hill, PhD JD
Co-Principal Investigator:
Jason Szkola, PhD MSW
Co-Investigator:
Michelle Lyttle Storrod, PhD
Amount Awarded:
$70,000