Chicago Center for Youth Violence Prevention

The Chicago Center on Youth Violence Prevention brings together researchers, community representatives, practitioners and policy makers committed to understanding and reducing youth violence within poor inner-city communities in Chicago; communities with some of the highest rates of youth violence in the country.  The core work of the Center is guided by the perspective that the most effective way to combat the problem of youth violence is through the coordination of empirical “pre-intervention” work designed to understand risk and development of youth violence and through rigorous evaluation of preventive interventions conducted both under tightly controlled conditions (i.e., randomized control efficacy trials) and in real world settings (i.e., effectiveness trials).   Central to the work of the Center is the understanding that context matters – that characteristics of the neighborhood and community in which youth and families reside are important in both impacting risk and in the development of effective interventions.  Inner-city communities are qualitatively different environments in which to live and raise children.  These differences have important implications for understanding risks associated with involvement in violence and the development and implementation of interventions designed to reduce youth violence.

The Center’s primary aims are: 

1. to bring together researchers, community representatives, practitioners and policy makers to build an integrative approach to address the issues of youth violence within poor inner-city neighborhoods in Chicago.  Implicitly, the work of the Center will address these issues across developmental periods and with children and families exhibiting different levels of risk and involvement in youth violence,
2. to promote the use of evidence based practice in efforts to reduce youth violence,
3. to develop a comprehensive surveillance system to be used to guide intervention activities and to evaluate changes in youth violence in communities and neighborhoods and
4. to provide training and technical assistance to support schools and community agencies in selecting, implementing and evaluating youth violence prevention programs,
5. to train new investigators in context-based prevention science, and
6. to disseminate empirical findings regionally and nationally.

SAFE Children Effectiveness Trial

The aims of the ACE are 1) to apply developmental-ecological understanding to violence prevention in communities, and 2) to use evidence-based interventions and evaluation tools in community violence prevention.  The SAFE Children Effectiveness Trial furthers both aims by applying an evidence-based intervention at a critical time in affecting the development of aggression, the entry into school.  Specifically, this study will help establish the utility of an efficacious program for preventing violence in inner-city communities.  This research has three specific aims.

The first aim of this study is to test, for families living in inner-city Chicago with children entering first grade, the effectiveness of an efficacious family-based preventive-intervention targeting key risk markers for later aggression and related problem behaviors called Schools and Families Educating Children, or SAFE Children. This intervention combines components focused on:  1) enhancing parent and child orientation to school; 2) academic tutoring; 3) promoting self-control in the child; 4) promoting the child’s social competence; 5) reducing aggression, and 6) improving parenting and family functioning. The intent is to make the first year of school one of helping families enhance ability to manage development within the inner-city community and children to succeed at school and socially.  In doing so, the risk for aggression and school failure is reduced and the risk for later violence should be reduced. In this trial we will apply strong scientific methods including random assignment and careful measurement of growth patterns over several years to test for replication of these effects but under conditions more approximating those of service provision typically. To do so, we will collaborate with community mental health providers and participating schools to test the effectiveness of SAFE Children when delivered by community mental health providers and student-tutors. Instead of using undergraduate tutors and graduate student family interventionists, as in the SAFE Children efficacy trial, the proposed study will implement SAFE Children with 8th grade tutors recruited from the schools the first grade subjects attend, and with family interventionists drawn from the staff of mental health centers serving the targeted communities.

The second aim of the study is to demonstrate that this intervention can be implemented with fidelity in conditions that are common for service to inner-city families. The goal is to show that with strong training and a good collaborative relationship between the center and the community schools and agencies we can have effective implementation. To that end we will study variation in implementation and how that relates to impact of the program. This information can be important for advancing knowledge about the use of efficacious programs in larger scale attempts to reduce youth violence.

The third aim is to understand how intervention effects are influenced by variations in characteristics among the population and neighborhood conditions. This focus will help inform prevention efforts to ensure they are ecologically sensitive.

Chicago Youth Development Study

The longitudinal study (Chicago Youth Development Study- CYDS) began in 1991 and tracks the development of risk for school failure, antisocial behavior, and violence among inner-city male adolescents. 

1. partner violence.  Continuation funding expanded the focus to include women by adding the romantic partners of the males and a cohort of similar age females to the sample.  Two annual waves of data were collected from these young men, their romantic partners and friends of their romantic partners and has allowed us to evaluate issues related to relationship development and partner violence among its population.
2. fathering.   The current funding is to designed to focus on the influences on paternity among inner-city young adults, the influences on father’s involvement with his child(ren) and the impact of involvement and parenting practices on his child(ren)’s development. We will collect two additional waves of data from the young adult males who took part in the Chicago Youth Development Study (CYDS). Two waves of data will be collected from the men, the biological and non-biological children of the men, and the mothers of both the biological and non-biological children.

SAFE Children

Schools and Families Educating Children (SAFE Children) applies knowledge developed from CYDS to an intervention.  The primary aim is to test, for families living in inner-city Chicago with children entering first grad, the effects of a family-based comprehensive preventative- intervention targeting key risk markers for later drug and other substance use.  Continuation funding was received to evaluate the impact of a booster intervention delivered during fourth grade, as well as the long term impact of the original intervention delivered during first grade.

GREAT Schools and Families

This is a multi-site school violence prevention initiative.  Four sites (UIC, Virginia Commonwealth University, University of Georgia at Athens, an Duke University) implemented a multi-component intervention designed to address a major scientific question regarding reducing school violence: Are greater reductions in school violence found when a general violence prevention program is implemented with all children in a given grade or when an intervention is targeted at those youth who are at greatest risk for involvement in violence (i.e. those already participating in a high rate of aggressive behavior)or are both types of intervention needed?  Programs that have previously shown the greatest promise in reducing youth violence were implemented and are being evaluated.  The intervention components are broken down into two approaches: universal and targeted intervention.  The universal intervention was implemented with all students in 6th grade.  The universal intervention has two components: a social cognitive and problem solving intervention delivered to students; and a teacher training component around the issues of classroom management strategies and building awareness of aggression and victimization in the classrooms.  The targeted intervention focused on those students who are at high risk for violence and includes a family intervention delivered in multiple family groups and a school-monitoring component.  12 Chicago Public Schools were randomized into 4 groups: 1) 4 schools receiving the universal intervention; 2) 4 schools receiving the targeted treatment; 3) 4 schools receiving both treatments; and 4) 4 comparison schools.

Metropolitan Area Child Study

MACS is a longitudinal research program conducted in selected Chicago and Aurora schools since the 1990-91 school year.  This program focuses on high-risk urban children with over 4,000 children participating in eight cohorts.  The purpose of MACS was to prevent the development of social competence.  Schools were randomly assigned to one of four conditions.  Some schools were control.  Others received a small group meeting for children that were high risk for aggression outside the classroom (in addition to the classroom program).  Finally, some schools had the classroom program, the small group meeting, and also a family program in the evenings for the children that participated in the small group.

Funding for these studies has been obtained from the National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration – Center for Substance Abuse Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Science Foundation, and the William T. Grant Foundation.