This study was designed to explore school culture and climate and their effects on school disorder, violence, and academic performance on two levels. At the macro level of analysis, this research examined the influences of sociocultural, crime, and school characteristics on aggregate-level school violence and academic performance measures. Here the focus was on understanding community, family, and crime compositional effects on disruption and violence in Philadelphia schools. This level included Census data and crime rates for the Census tracts where the schools were located (local data), as well as for the community of residence of the students (imported data) for all 255 schools within the Philadelphia School District. The second level of analysis, the intermediate level, included all of the variables measured at the macro level, and added school organizational structure and school climate, measured with survey data, as mediating variables. Part 1, Macro-Level Data, contains arrest and offense data and Census characteristics, such as race, poverty level, and household income, for the Census tracts where each of the 255 Philadelphia schools is located and for the Census tracts where the students who attend those schools reside. In addition, this file contains school characteristics, such as number and race of students and teachers, student attendance, average exam scores, and number of suspensions for various reasons. For Part 2, Principal Interview Data, principals from all 42 middle schools in Philadelphia were interviewed on the number of buildings and classrooms in their school, square footage and special features of the school, and security measures. For Part 3, teachers were administered the Effective School Battery survey and asked about their job satisfaction, training opportunities, relationships with principals and parents, participation in school activities, safety measures, and fear of crime at school. In Part 4, students were administered the Effective School Battery survey and asked about their attachment to school, extracurricular activities, attitudes toward teachers and school, academic achievement, and fear of crime at school. Part 5, Student Victimization Data, asked the same students from Part 4 about their victimization experiences, the availability of drugs, and discipline measures at school. It also provides self-reports of theft, assault, drug use, gang membership, and weapon possession at school.

This project seeks to to provide clear and comprehensive answers to the questions that plague researchers on how school violence impacts future student outcomes. To that end, the principal investigators plan to review, organize, and synthesize extant research on consequences of school violence and aggression for perpetrators and victims by conducting a systematic review and meta-analysis on longitudinal studies of school violence and outcomes. The primary goal of the current study is to conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis of the extant longitudinal research literature on the consequences of school violence.

This study of violent incidents among middle- and high-school students focused not only on the types and frequency of these incidents, but also on their dynamics -- the locations, the opening moves, the relationship between the disputants, the goals and justifications of the aggressor, the role of third parties, and other factors. For this study, violence was defined as an act carried out with the intention, or perceived intention, of physically injuring another person, and the "opening move" was defined as the action of a respondent, antagonist, or third party that was viewed as beginning the violent incident. Data were obtained from interviews with 70 boys and 40 girls who attended public schools with populations that had high rates of violence. About half of the students came from a middle school in an economically disadvantaged African-American section of a large southern city. The neighborhood the school served, which included a public housing project, had some of the country's highest rates of reported violent crime. The other half of the sample were volunteers from an alternative high school attended by students who had committed serious violations of school rules, largely involving illegal drugs, possession of handguns, or fighting. Many students in this high school, which is located in a large city in the southern part of the Midwest, came from high-crime areas, including public housing communities. The interviews were open-ended, with the students encouraged to speak at length about any violent incidents in school, at home, or in the neighborhood in which they had been involved. The 110 interviews yielded 250 incidents and are presented as text files, Parts 3 and 4. The interview transcriptions were then reduced to a quantitative database with the incident as the unit of analysis (Part 1). Incidents were diagrammed, and events in each sequence were coded and grouped to show the typical patterns and sub-patterns in the interactions. Explanations the students offered for the violent-incident behavior were grouped into two categories: (1) "justifications," in which the young people accepted responsibility for their violent actions but denied that the actions were wrong, and (2) "excuses," in which the young people admitted the act was wrong but denied responsibility. Every case in the incident database had at least one physical indicator of force or violence. The respondent-level file (Part 2) was created from the incident-level file using the AGGREGATE procedure in SPSS. Variables in Part 1 include the sex, grade, and age of the respondent, the sex and estimated age of the antagonist, the relationship between respondent and antagonist, the nature and location of the opening move, the respondent's response to the opening move, persons present during the incident, the respondent's emotions during the incident, the person who ended the fight, punishments imposed due to the incident, whether the respondent was arrested, and the duration of the incident. Additional items cover the number of times during the incident that something was thrown, the respondent was pushed, slapped, or spanked, was kicked, bit, or hit with a fist or with something else, was beaten up, cut, or bruised, was threatened with a knife or gun, or a knife or gun was used on the respondent. Variables in Part 2 include the respondent's age, gender, race, and grade at the time of the interview, the number of incidents per respondent, if the respondent was an armed robber or a victim of an armed robbery, and whether the respondent had something thrown at him/her, was pushed, slapped, or spanked, was kicked, bit, or hit with a fist or with something else, was beaten up, was threatened with a knife or gun, or had a knife or gun used on him/her.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate a comprehensive, research-based framework of recommended practices for integrating police into the educational environment. This research tested use of a multi-faceted school-based law enforcement (SBLE) framework to determine how the framework contributes to multiple outcomes. The objectives for this study were to: (1) implement a randomized controlled trial to test a comprehensive framework for SBLE involving 25 middle and high schools; (2) assess the impacts of this framework on student victimization and delinquency, use of exclusionary discipline practices (e.g., suspension, expulsion), school climate measures, and student-officer interactions; and (3) disseminate tangible findings that can immediately be translated into practice and further research in schools nationwide.

The purpose of this study was to gather evidence on the relationship between discipline and the control of victimization in schools and to investigate the effectiveness of humanistic versus coercive disciplinary measures. Survey data were obtained from students, teachers, and principals in each of the 44 junior and senior high schools in a county in Ohio that agreed to participate in the study. The data represent roughly a six-month time frame. Students in grades 7 through 12 were anonymously surveyed in February 1994. The Student Survey (Part 1) was randomly distributed to approximately half of the students in all classrooms in each school. The other half of the students received a different survey that focused on drug use among students (not available with this collection). The teacher (Part 2) and principal (Part 3) surveys were completed at the same time as the student survey. The principal survey included both closed-ended and open-ended questions, while all questions on the student and teacher surveys were closed-ended, with a finite set of answers from which to choose. The three questionnaires were designed to gather respondent demographics, perceptions about school discipline and control, information about weapons and gangs in the school, and perceptions about school crime, including personal victimization and responses to victimization. All three surveys asked whether the school had a student court and, if so, what sanctions could be imposed by the student court for various forms of student misconduct. The student survey and teacher surveys also asked about the availability at school of various controlled drugs. The student survey elicited information about the student's fear of crime in the school and on the way to and from school, avoidance behaviors, and possession of weapons for protection. Data were also obtained from the principals on each school's suspension/expulsion rate, the number and type of security guards and/or devices used within the school, and other school safety measures. In addition to the surveys, census data were acquired for a one-quarter-mile radius around each participating school's campus, providing population demographics, educational attainment, employment status, marital status, income levels, and area housing information. Also, arrest statistics for six separate crimes (personal crime, property crime, simple assault, disorderly conduct, drug/alcohol offenses, and weapons offenses) for the reporting district in which each school was located were obtained from local police departments. Finally, the quality of the immediate neighborhood was assessed by means of a "windshield" survey in which the researchers conducted a visual inventory of various neighborhood characteristics: type and quality of housing in the area, types of businesses, presence of graffiti and gang graffiti, number of abandoned cars, and the number and perceived age of pedestrians and people loitering in the area. These contextual data are also contained in Part 3.

The Wisconsin School Violence and Bullying Prevention Study sought to understand the impact of comprehensive bullying prevention programs on outcomes related to violence, safety, and bullying rates. This study focused on 24 middle schools (grades 6 to 8) in Wisconsin. To examine the effectiveness of the school's current anti-bullying program, the Bullying Prevention Program Assessment tool (BPPAT) was completed at the end of the school year. The BPPAT focused on administrative policy and procedures geared towards students, faculty, parents, or administrators. This tool examined the following items: policy and procedures, program implementation, staff training, parental education and communication, student training, reporting systems, and continuous quality improvement (CQI). Students and faculty were given surveys to determine bullying rates and perceptions of school safety. The school safety survey was given to all students concerning their bullying victimization and perception of school safety. This survey contains the following demographic variables: age, sex, grade, and race. The verified bullying incident data contains incident reporting from faculty, which focused on the type of bullying and the demographics of the perpetrator and victim. After new bullying prevention programs were implemented, students were given the safety and bullying victimization survey which focused on perceptions of bullying and school safety. The number of bullying incidents, number of student victims and perpetrators, and the demographic characteristics of victims and perpetrators were retained in aggregate form for each school were submitted to the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) for analysis.

The 2016 School Survey on Crime and Safety (SSOCS:2016) is a data collection that is part of the School Survey on Crime and Safety program; program data are available since 2000 at . SSOCS:2016 (https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/ssocs/) is a cross-sectional survey of the nation's public schools designed to provide estimates of school crime, discipline, disorder, programs and policies. Regular public schools were sampled. The data collection was conducted using a mail questionnaire with telephone follow-up. The data collection's response rate was 62.9 percent. Key statistics produced from SSOCS:2016 include the frequency and types of disciplinary actions taken for select offenses; perceptions of other disciplinary problems, such as bullying, verbal abuse and disorder in the classroom; the presence and role of school security staff; parent and community involvement; staff training; mental health services available to students; and school policies and programs concerning crime and safety.

This research project sought to evaluate the impact of broad-based multifaceted violence prevention programs versus programs that have a more limited focus. Two specific programs were evaluated in four New York City middle schools. The more limited program used Project S.T.O.P.(Students Teaching Options for Peace), a conflict resolution and peer mediation training program. The full multi-faceted program combined Project S.T.O.P. with Safe Harbor, a program that provided victimization counseling and taught violence prevention. The effects of this combined program, offered in three of the middle schools, were compared to those of just the Project S.T.O.P. program alone in one middle school. To study the program models, researchers used a quasi-experimental pre-post design, with nonequivalent comparison groups. Questionnaires were given to students to assess the impact of the two programs. Students were asked about their knowledge and use of prevention programs in their schools. Data were also collected on students' history of victimization, such as whether they were ever attacked at school, stolen from, mugged, or threatened with a weapon. Students were also asked about their attitudes toward verbal abuse, victims of violence, and conditions when revenge is acceptable, and their exposure to violence, including whether they knew anyone who was sexually abused, beaten, or attacked because of race, gender, or sexual orientation. Additional questions covered students' use of aggressive behaviors, such as whether they had threatened someone with a weapon or had beaten, slapped, hit, or kicked someone. Data were also gathered on the accessibility of alcohol, various drugs, weapons, and stolen property. Demographic variables include students' school grade, class, sex, number of brothers and sisters, and household composition.

This study is to understand how perceptions and the organization of school safety and security are associated with the level and type of law enforcement engagement in rural schools. A triangulation mixed methods design was used to collect and examine individual, school, and community level quantitative and qualitative data. The social-ecological theory of violence prevention guides the research by predicting that an interplay of factors at multiple levels influences the type and level of law enforcement engagement in rural schools. Specifically, it was predicted that the more organized and coordinated a school is in the area of safety and security, the more likely it is to be formally engaged with law enforcement. Formal engagement is defined as use of some version of the school resource officer (SRO) model or defined roles and responsibilities for law enforcement in schools that are articulated in documents such as a memorandum of agreement or understanding.