Challenges to Advancing the Development of Effective School-Based Violence Prevention Programs

Objective: Youth violence represents a significant public health problem that has serious and often lasting consequences for its victims and perpetrators. School-based interventions have considerable potential for playing a central role in prevention efforts. Although a variety of school-based interventions have shown some degree of success, further work is needed to improve their effectiveness. This article discusses several challenges that have impeded efforts to develop and evaluate school-based violence prevention programs and how these challenges might be addressed. Method: This article draws upon theoretical and empirical research on youth violence to highlight critical issues that have limited efforts to develop effective school-based youth violence prevention programs. Results: Applying a prevention science framework indicates that interventions are unlikely to be effective unless they target risk and protective factors most relevant to a specific population. Research on factors associated with youth violence suggests the need for comprehensive interventions that address risk and protective factors across multiple social-ecological domains. Subgroup differences in the effects of school-based violence prevention programs indicate the need for a better understanding of differences in patterns of risk and protective factors both across and within populations. Conclusions: Improving the effectiveness of school-based youth violence prevention programs will require an iterative process to identify subgroups of individuals across and within populations that differ in their patterns of risk and protective factors, to refine logic models to guide the development of interventions tailored to specific populations, and to evaluate interventions using designs that examine variability in intervention effects across subgroups.