Optimizing Screening Tools for Identifying Children at Risk for Violence

 描述(申请人提供)：青少年侵犯(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经济负担，使有效预防成为最重要的公共卫生问题。虽然已经制定了几个有经验支持的预防计划，以针对有可能在青春期表现出慢性攻击性和严重暴力(A-SV)的小学生，但还没有明确地设计筛查工具来确定社区中哪些儿童应该参加这些计划。目前的情况是，根据各种特别筛查程序招募儿童参加这些干预措施，这些程序旨在描绘有早期行为问题(例如，违抗、撒谎、打架)的青少年。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将在青春期表现出持续性A-SV模式的儿童方面相对较差。其结果是，不必要地向低风险儿童实施昂贵的预防计划，而相当大一部分最需要暴力预防服务的儿童被忽视。为解决这一问题，拟议的研究将采用多阶段测量发展策略，创建一套针对告密者的筛查工具(即家长、教师、青少年报告)，明确旨在确定儿童在青春期表现出慢性A-SV的风险。首先，四项大型纵向研究的次级数据分析将被用来确定多个领域的风险因素(例如，低学校融洽、同伴偏差)，这些因素最准确和一致地描绘出小学生在青春期(~13-20岁)多年来表现出A-SV的风险。这将包括确定有助于优化分类准确性的特定于线人的风险因素。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种特定于告密者的筛查工具，以评估最佳地将处于风险中的儿童归类为 在纵向研究中表现为慢性A-SV。旨在评估每个风险因素的综合题库将通过系统地识别和提取所有项目来创建 文献中存在的相关文书。一个由青年暴力问题国际专家组成的联盟将系统地完善项目集，以优化结构覆盖范围和内容清晰度，并将利用与目标线人的认知访谈来进一步确定和纠正有问题的项目。然后，将招募2520名小学生的全国样本，对暴力风险筛查工具进行心理测量学改进和验证。利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，将测量误差降至最低，并优化精度，以包括在最终版本的筛查工具中。该项目的成果将是一套免费的、基于经验的、精确的风险筛查工具，可以在多种环境中使用，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.