This project examined the problem behaviors of maltreated children and adolescents and the predictors of changes in behavior over an 18-month period. Problem behaviors included aggression, delinquency, risky sexual practices, substance abuse, and suicidal behaviors. The project used data from the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being (NSCAW), a national probability survey of children assessed following a child maltreatment report. This collection consists of SAS code used to produce subsets of the NSCAW data and the analyses for three chapters of the project's final report. Chapter 2 examined aggression and changes in behavior over 18 months for children aged six to ten years at the time of the baseline interview. Chapter 3 examined self-reported delinquency and caregiver-reported aggressive and delinquent behavior and changes in behavior over 18 months for youth aged 11 to 15 years at the time of the baseline interview. Chapter 4 examined risky behavior changes (risky sexual behavior, substance abuse, and suicidal risk behavior) over 18 months for youth aged 11 to 15 years at the time of the baseline interview.

The study sought to measure knowledge about laws related to domestic violence and harassment, resources for help, rape myths, and skills such as conflict resolution; attitudes about the acceptability of violent, abusive, and harassing behaviors; behavioral intentions to avoid committing violent acts in the future as well as intentions to intervene when in the position of a bystander; behavioral measures about peer and dating partner physical and sexual violence experienced as a victim or perpetrator, and sexual harassment experienced as a victim or perpetrator; and other items covering a demographic profile of the students and questions on prior attendance at an educational program about sexual assault, harassment, or violence, and prior history of dating.Researchers randomly assigned a school-based intervention to 6th and 7th grade classes (over 2,500 students) in 30 public middle schools in New York City to one of four conditions: (1) a classroom-based intervention; (2) a school-wide intervention; (3) interventions that included both classroom and school-wide components; or (4) a (no treatment) control group. The classroom based intervention was delivered through a six session curriculum that emphasized the consquences for perpetrators of domestic violence and harassment, state laws and penalties for domestic violence and harassment, the construction of gender roles, and healthy relationships. The school-wide intervention included the development and use of temporary school-based restraining orders, higher levels of faculty and security presence in areas identified by students and school personnel as unsafe "hot spots", and the use of posters to increase awareness and reporting of domestic violence and harassment to school personnel. Pencil and paper surveys were distributed to students at three different times: (1) immediately before the assignment to one of the four study conditions, (2) immediately after the treatment (or control condition) was completed, and (3) between five and six months after assignment to one of the four study conditions. The surveys took about 40 minutes to complete and were completed in the classroom during one class period.

The goal of this study was to test specific hypotheses illustrating the relationships among serious victimization experiences, the mental health effects of victimization, substance abuse/use, and delinquent behavior in adolescents. The study assessed familial and nonfamilial types of violence. It was designed as a telephone survey of American youth aged 12-17 living in United States households and residing with a parent or guardian. One parent or guardian in each household was interviewed briefly to establish rapport, secure permission to interview the targeted adolescent, and to ensure the collection of comparative data to examine potential nonresponse bias from households without adolescent participation. All interviews with both parents and adolescents were conducted using Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI) technology. From the surveys of parents and adolescents, the principal investigators created one data file by attaching the data from the parents to the records of their respective adolescents. Adolescents were asked whether violence and drug abuse were problems in their schools and communities and what types of violence they had personally witnessed. They were also asked about other stressful events in their lives, such as the loss of a family member, divorce, unemployment, moving to a new home or school, serious illness or injury, and natural disaster. Questions regarding history of sexual assault, physical assault, and harsh physical discipline elicited a description of the event and perpetrator, extent of injuries, age at abuse, whether alcohol or drugs were involved, and who was informed of the incident. Information was also gathered on the delinquent behavior of respondents and their friends, including destruction of property, assault, theft, sexual assault, and gang activity. Other questions covered history of personal and family substance use and mental health indicators, such as major depression, post-traumatic stress disorders, weight changes, sleeping disorders, and problems concentrating. Demographic information was gathered from the adolescents on age, race, gender, number of people living in household, and grade in school. Parents were asked whether they were concerned about violent crime, affordable child care, drug abuse, educational quality, gangs, and the safety of their children at school. In addition, they were questioned about their own victimization experiences and whether they discussed personal safety issues with their children. Parents also supplied demographic information on gender, marital status, number of children, employment status, education, race, and income.

This study examined the evolution of exposure to violence and psychological distress among adolescents using a sample of 1,354 male and female youths who completed a baseline assessment and 10 follow-up interviews over a seven-year period as part of the Pathways to Desistence study. Statistical analyses were utilized to identify a taxonomy based on adolescents' patterns of exposure to violence as well as to explore the association between the analytically-identified exposure to violence patterns and various psychological symptoms. Additional models were analyzed to examine changes in exposure to violence over time, changes in psychological distress over time, the contemporaneous, parallel processes of changes in exposure to violence and psychological distress over time, and differences in the evolution of violence exposure and psychological distress across sex and race/ethnicity.

A major goal of juvenile justice reform is to reduce reoffending and recidivism among juvenile offenders. Advocates of trauma informed practices assert that disproportionately high rates of violence exposure and trauma symptoms exacerbate the delinquent and violent behavior of juvenile offenders, but there is little evidence of the role of trauma in reoffending, particularly for the group of juvenile offenders that are at the highest risk for reoffending: serious offenders. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to conduct secondary data analysis on data from the Pathways to Desistance Study (Mulvey et al., 2004) to enhance understanding of how continuous trauma exposure and related symptoms impact reoffending in serious juvenile offenders. This study utilized secondary data analysis on six annual waves of data from the Pathways to Desistance study (Mulvey et al., 2004), a large multi-site, longitudinal study of adolescents who had committed a serious criminal offense. The study followed juvenile offenders into adulthood. The current study analyzed youth self-report of demographic variables, community violence exposure, trauma-related symptoms, and violent offending, as well as official records of youth offending. Regression analysis, latent transition analysis, and survival analysis were used to examine the research questions and hypotheses. Results showed that the majority of participants experienced continuous violence exposure as witnesses to community violence, with lower rates for victimization. Further, violence exposure and trauma-related symptoms (anxiety and hostility) co-occurred over time. Also, continuous violence exposure during adolescence predicted self-reported violent reoffending in early adulthood, even after controlling for demographic factors. Victimization significantly increased the risk for re-arrest. Further, this risk of re-offending was higher for male offenders than for female offenders. Finally, callous-unemotional traits and hostility mediated the relationship between continuous violence exposure and later violent offending. In this study, data from the Pathways to Desistance study were analyzed using SPSS and Mplus software packages, and the syntax files used to analyze the data have been included. The Pathways to Desistance study datasets are archived at the University of Michigan Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), and the PI obtained the Pathways data from ICPSR.

This study examined the social relationships and behavior of physically abused schoolchildren. Its emphasis on peer relationships was based on the fact that abused children’s basic socializing and support system -- their relationship with family -- was expected to be damaged and give rise to internalizing and externalizing problems. Their peer networks therefore were expected to play a disproportionate role in their adaptive functioning in many domains of development. Family relationships, operating through social learning and social cognitive processes, were expected to influence children’s social behavior, giving rise to aggressive and antisocial behavior. Such behavior was hypothesized to raise the risk for lowered social status with peers which in turn was expected to lead to internalizing and externalizing problem behaviors. For abused children who managed to establish good relationships with peers, such relationships might mitigate the effects of abuse on later functioning. The sample consisted of 100 physically abused urban schoolchildren (65 boys, 35 girls) ages 9-12 years and in grades 4-6, and 100 non-abused classmates case-matched for gender, age, and, as closely as possible, for race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. Control subjects were screened for abuse by interviews with their caretakers about the handling of disputes among household members, and by scanning the Abuse Register to ascertain that their names did not appear during the 4 years we were recruiting abuse cases. Abused children were recruited from confirmed cases of physical abuse in consecutive entries onto the Abuse Register from 1992 to 1996. Children who were sexually abused were excluded, but children who were neglected as well as physically abused were not. The first 100 families meeting study criteria and agreeing to participate were enrolled. Practically all the children were of minority status. Sociometric assessments were carried out in the 100 classrooms of the abuse/control pairs to determine subjects’ sociometric status among same-gender classmates; interviews were conducted with the children about their friends and understanding of social relationships; interviews were conducted with their parents about family and household demographics, family stressful life events, mental health of the child’s major caretaker, and intra-family relationships; classmates rated the children’s prosocial and antisocial behavior; and teachers and parents rated children’s problem behavior. Results indicated that children’s social expectations regarding peers, and two social behaviors -- aggressive and prosocial behavior -- mediated between abuse and positive and negative social status, and between abuse and positive and negative reciprocity. Social expectations and withdrawn behavior mediated between abuse and positive social status. Social expectations and negative social status (peer rejection) mediated between abuse and internalizing problems. Acknowledging that family contextual factors are important influences on child outcome, we proposed an ecological model that designated family stress as the principal exogenous factor, with effects on outcome mediated through caretaker distress, partner violence, and physical child abuse. Outcomes included parent-, teacher- and peer-rated child behavior. Results were consistent with the hypothesis that partner violence and caretaker distress, both associated with family stress, increase the risk for child abuse and thereby raise the child’s risk for problem behaviors. Investigators: Suzanne Salzinger, Ph.D. New York State Psychiatric Institute New York, NY Richard Feldman, Ph.D. New York State Psychiatric Institute New York, NY Daisy S. Ng-Mak, Ph.D. Columbia University New York, NY

Youth violence is violence or aggression perpetuated by or targeted against youth and includes many forms such as violent crime, physical violence (e.g., fighting, use of firearms), and the numerous manifestations of bullying (e.g., overt, social/relational, and cyber bullying). New research is needed to enhance our understanding of the factors and processes associated with youth violence. This research focuses on key factors within individuals and multiple contexts that may robustly predict the perpetration and amelioration of violence among youth but that have received scant attention in previous research, especially in concert with each other. Specifically, the factors within individuals the investigators examined include cognition (e.g., attitudes towards retaliation and bystander intervention) and social-emotional adjustment (e.g., rejection sensitivity, affect, aggressive behavior and victimization) while the multiple contexts will include peer (e.g., characteristics and status of peer group, sociometric and perceived popularity), school (e.g., school connectedness, student-teacher relationship), and family contexts (e.g., attachment, family hostility). This dataset seeks to aid scholars hoping to understand adolescents' attitudes and judgments surrounding peer aggression, with attention both to attitudes surrounding bystander intervention to stop aggression and retaliation when exposed to such aggression. This project is a year-long longitudinal study with 6th graders and 9th graders in order to identify factors related to responses to peer aggression and to examine these relations over time.

These data are part of NACJD's Fast Track Release and are distributed as they were received from the data depositor. The files have been zipped by NACJD for release, but not checked or processed except for the removal of direct identifiers. Users should refer to the accompanying readme file for a brief description of the files available with this collection and consult the investigator(s) if further information is needed. The purpose of this was to leverage an existing randomized controlled trial of The Second Step anti-bullying program, which was implemented when the sample of students was in middle school, by measuring related aggressive behaviors (e.g. bullying, cyberbullying, sexual violence) during the high school years. The objectives of this study were to determine treatment effects of the Second Step middle school program on reductions in youth aggression (including bullying), sexual violence, substance use, and teen dating violence when in high school, as well as to assess middle school belonging as a mediator of these treatment effects on targeted problem behaviors in high school. Demographic variables included as part of this collection are students' age, gender, race, and household characteristics. The collection contains 3 SPSS data files: analysis4_de-identified_2.sav (n=2143; 304 variables) RCT-WAVE-1-4-ITEMS_RECODED_de-identified_2.sav (n=4718; 741 variables) RCT---WAVE-5-7-ITEMS_RECODED_de-identified_2.sav (n=3064; 887 variables)

The Pathways to Desistance study is a multi-site, longitudinal study of serious adolescent offenders as they transition from adolescence into early adulthood. Between November, 2000 and January, 2003, 1,354 adjudicated youths from the juvenile and adult court systems in Maricopa County (Phoenix), Arizona (N = 654) and Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania (N = 700) were enrolled into the study.The enrolled youth were at least 14 years old and under 18 years old at the time of their committing offense and were found guilty of a serious offense (predominantly felonies, with a few exceptions for some misdemeanor property offenses, sexual assault, or weapons offenses).Each study participant was followed for a period of seven years past enrollment, with the end result a comprehensive picture of life changes in a wide array of areas over the course of this time.The study sought to inform the ongoing debate in the juvenile justice system regarding the treatment and processing of serious adolescent offenders. The larger aim of the Pathways series is to improve decision-making by court and social service personnel and to clarify policy debates about alternatives for serious adolescent offenders.Additional datasets from the Pathways study will be released during 2013. These datasets will include official records information (e.g. re-arrest, placement), and monthly life-calendar data on a range of topics (e.g. school, work). These additional datasets will not be publicly available, but rather made available through ICPSR's restricted data access system.For more information, please visit the Research on Pathways to Desistance web site.

The overall goal of this study was to acquire a greater understanding of the development of adolescent antisocial behavior using data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN). Longitudinal cohort data from PHDCN were analyzed to assess patterns of substance use and delinquency across three waves for three age cohorts and 78 neighborhoods. This analysis of existing PHDCN data used multiple cohort and multilevel latent growth models as well as several ancillary approaches to answer questions pertinent to the development of adolescent antisocial behavior.