Prevalence of community gun violence exposure and consequences for adolescent well-being: identifying sources of heterogeneity to disrupt the cycle of violence

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PROJECT ABSTRACT Community violence, defined as intentional, interpersonal acts of violence committed in public places, is a recognized form of trauma that disproportionately impacts youth of color. Past research has linked exposure to community violence with a wide range of adverse outcomes that elevate risk for subsequent violence involvement. But several gaps in the literature remain. First, few studies focus on exposure to community violence involving guns. Second, there is a critical dearth of fine-grained data on gun violence at the small-area level from other sources beyond self-reported survey items, which provide an incomplete picture of the broader spectrum of gun violence experiences and exposure. Third, although it is commonly hypothesized that the consequences of exposure to violence vary by individual, family, school, and neighborhood characteristics, past research on this type of effect heterogeneity is rare, limiting our understanding of the risk and protective factors that confer differential vulnerability or resilience to community gun violence exposure and the best ways to target strategies for preventing subsequent gun violence-related harm. To address these gaps in knowledge, the proposed project is designed to estimate the population prevalence and consequences of youths' exposure to community gun violence, regardless of whether the violence was experienced firsthand, and to identify the malleable risk and protective factors associated with variations therein. This work will use a unique combination of longitudinal data on a national, probability-based sample of youth and their families, schools, and neighborhoods from the 1998/2000 to 2014/17 waves of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS) geospatially linked with highly resolved temporal and spatial information on deadly gun violence incidents from the Gun Violence Archive (GVA). These data will allow for the first detailed, nationally representative estimates of youths' exposure to community gun violence, as well as for a more definitive assessment of the impacts of community gun violence exposure on a wide range of youths' social-emotional health and behavioral outcomes that have been associated in past research with subsequent gun violence- related harm. They will also allow for the implementation of propensity score matching methods to strengthen causal inference by accounting for a comprehensive set of pre-exposure characteristics that predict youths' likelihood of experiencing an incident of deadly gun violence in their local environment. All of these advances will provide considerable traction on the final goal of identifying individual, familial, school, and neighborhood- level factors associated with increased vulnerability or resilience to the adverse impacts of community gun violence exposure on which the development and implementation of violence prevention strategies designed to disrupt the cycle of violence can be based. This research addresses Research Objective One under Funding Option A.