Optimizing Screening Tools for Identifying Children at Risk for Violence

 描述（由申请人提供）：青少年攻击（例如，欺凌、打架）和严重暴力（例如，枪击、抢劫）给社会带来了相当大的情感和财政负担，使有效预防成为首要的公共卫生问题。虽然已经制定了几个经验支持的预防方案，以针对小学儿童表现出慢性攻击和严重暴力（A-SV）到青春期的风险，没有筛选工具已明确设计，以确定在社区中的儿童谁应该参加这些方案。目前，儿童被招募到这些干预措施的基础上，各种特设的筛选程序，旨在界定青年与早期行为问题（例如，谎言，谎言，战斗）。最近对这些筛查策略的纵向检查表明，它们在准确识别那些在青春期表现出持续A-SV模式的儿童方面相对较差。因此，昂贵的预防方案被不必要地用于低风险儿童，而很大一部分最需要预防暴力服务的儿童被忽视。为了解决这个问题，拟议的研究将使用多阶段的测量发展战略，以创建一套特定的信息（即，家长、教师、青少年报告）筛选工具，明确设计用于识别青少年期有慢性A-SV风险的儿童。首先，将使用四项大型纵向研究的次要数据分析来确定多个领域的风险因素（例如，低学校联系，同伴偏差），最准确和一致地描述了在青春期（约13-20岁）的多年中处于表现出A-SV风险的小学儿童。这将包括确定有助于优化分类准确性的特定于举报人的风险因素。接下来，将使用最先进的定性和定量测量开发技术来创建三个特定于信息提供者的筛选工具，以评估最能将儿童风险分类的风险因素。 在纵向研究中显示慢性A-SV。将通过系统地从所有项目中确定和提取项目，建立一个旨在评估每个风险因素的综合项目库。 文献中存在的相关工具。一个青年暴力问题国际专家联合会将系统地完善项目集，以优化结构覆盖面和内容清晰度，并将利用与目标线人的认知访谈来进一步查明和纠正有问题的项目。然后，将招募2520名小学生的全国样本，从心理测量学上完善和验证暴力风险筛查工具。使用项目反应理论和计算机自适应测试方法，将选择一个有效的项目子集，最大限度地减少测量误差和优化精度，以纳入筛选工具的最终版本。该项目的成果将是一套免费的、以经验为基础的精确风险筛查工具，可在多种环境中使用，以确定最需要有针对性的暴力预防服务的儿童。

 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Youth aggression (e.g., bullying, fighting) and serious violence (e.g., shootings, robbery) places a considerable emotional and financial burden on society, making effective prevention a paramount public health concern. While several empirically supported prevention programs have been developed to target elementary school children at risk for exhibiting chronic aggression and serious violence (A-SV) into adolescence, no screening tools have been explicitly designed to identify children in the community who should be enrolled in these programs. As it stands, children are recruited into these interventions based on various ad hoc screening procedures designed to delineate youth with early conduct problems (e.g., defiance, lying, fighting). Recent longitudinal examinations of these screening strategies indicate that they are relatively poor at accurately identifying those children who will exhibit a persistent pattern of A-SV across adolescence. As a result, costly prevention programs are being unnecessarily administered to low-risk children, while a sizable portion of children most in need of violence prevention services are overlooked. To address this issue, the proposed study will use a multi-staged measurement development strategy to create a set of informant-specific (i.e., parent, teacher, youth report) screening instruments explicitly designed to identify children at risk for exhibiting chronic A-SV across adolescence. First, secondary data analysis of four large longitudinal studies will be used to identify the risk factor across multiple domains (e.g., low school bonding, peer deviance) that most accurately and consistently delineate elementary school children at risk for exhibiting A-SV across multiple years during adolescence (~ages 13-20). This will include identifying informant-specific risk factors that help to optimize classification accuracy. Next, state-of-the-art qualitative and quantitative measurement development techniques will be used to create three informant-specific screening instruments that assess the risk factors that best classify children at risk for exhibiting chronic A-SV across the longitudinal studies. A comprehensive item bank designed to assess each risk factor will be created by systematically identifying and extracting items from all relevant instruments that exist in the literature. A Consortium of international experts on youth violence will systematically refine the item set to optimize construct coverage and content clarity, and cognitive interviews with targeted informants will be used to further identify and rectify problematic items. A national sample of 2520 elementary school children will then be recruited to psychometrically refine and validate the violence risk screening tools. Using item response theory and computer adaptive testing methods, an efficient subset of items that minimize measurement error and optimize precision will be selected for inclusion in the final version of the screening instruments. The deliverables from this project will be a set of free, empirically- based, and precise risk screening instruments that can be used in multiple settings to identify children most in need of targeted violence prevention services.