Public School Violence
Public school violence is a social issue that is becoming more and more an epidemic. Taking a closer look at the word violence, it is defined as “Behavior generally involving physical force intended to damage, hurt or kill something or someone” (Oxford, 2018). It is hard to ignore now the constant media coverage on the many school shootings happening throughout America. In this paper I’ll be discussing the research and studies on the social topic of public school violence. This also ties in with youth mental health, the school system, and social/environment.
The study design
The study of this topic was conducted in 2003, and the surveys to fuel this study were from the CDC in the spring of 1998-1999 when school violence was being publicized at a rate which made it a common household worry. Researchers at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis wanted to specifically study the link between overall school functioning and frequency of violent behaviors among young adolescents ages 10–14 (Lytle and Perry, 2001). They started the study by looking at, fights, and individual violence cases extremely close. Data was reported from 16 schools; the dependent variable was past-year fighting or violent behavior reported in the spring 1999 survey. Based on pilot testing, questions from three existing instruments were combined to create a five-item scale. The scale was computed by assigning each response category the midpoint value and summing the values.
The main independent variable was a SFI (School Functioning Index), an original measure developed to characterize the overall functioning and stability of schools. Public health and adolescent health literature were focused on certain health behaviors rather than overall school functioning (Stevens and Davis, 1988). Essentially, these measures were used to examine the relationship between positive school functioning and violent behavior among young adolescents. It is personally believed that they conducted the experiment this way, so they could organize their findings because there was nothing already available to use as guides. The full spectrum of variables also included items more specifically connected to violence, including the presence and types of policies on student aggressive behavior, frequency of disciplinary actions. After data collection was finished, however, serious concerns about the effectiveness of these items led researchers to exclude them from the index (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2000). Other Variables Substance use, which was expected to be highly predictive of violent behavior, was measured with standard questions from Monitoring the Future (Johnston, 1998) concerning use of alcohol, marijuana and other inhaled substances in the past 30 days, and average number of cigarettes smoked in a week. The level of depressive symptoms, educational expectations, and future outlook were measured as well using scales that have been well correlated with other health behaviors in their sample (Schmitz, 2002). The demographic variables are indicators of social conditions, such as poverty, the status of immigrants, that may affect school functioning in multiple ways, such as the availability and distribution of resources within and outside schools, experiences of discrimination, cultural barriers, and relative unfairness.
Results 3878 of the 4050 eligible Grade 7 students completed the survey which would be 98. 5%(Birnbaum, 2003). Past-30-day, Alcohol use was higher than that of tobacco, marijuana and other inhaled substances. Small changes from fall to spring indicated slight increases in risk behaviors and slight decreases in psychosocial well-being over the course of Grade 7 evaluations. Low-functioning schools reported a 66% higher violent behavior rate compared to high functioning schools who sat at a 33% violent behavior rate. In their study, they concluded that overall school functioning was negatively related to violent behavior in the majority of students in this larger sample of Grade 7 students (Birrnbaum, 2003). They used a more powerful approach given the small amount of schools surveyed in the study. Their findings suggested that Interpretations should be limited to behaviors represented in our violence measure. We did not distinguish between violence on and off school grounds, and the time frame for the questions was the past 12 months, which may be too long for young adolescents to recall (Carolina Population Center, 1999). Through the course of the study, as well as afterward, there was an extensive correlation between youth mental health and the functioning of public schools. The only problems/flaws I saw within the study were that the experiment was only conducted within one state to only 16 schools, they could have tried getting data from other schools in other states as well to get a more rounded experiment.
The study on public school violence enhances the field of sociology because we can understand how one person can change things for many and how the public school environment. The way we think has a lot to do with our actions. This impacts the world in the sense that we need to take mental health seriously as well as the function of our schools into consideration. It should not be something overlooked anymore and if we can help our children refrain from violence as a resort, then we can eliminate the treat of seeing it continue to be an issue for the future generations in schools everywhere.
