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Curated

Impact Evaluation of Youth Crime Watch Programs in Three Florida School Districts, 1997-2007 (ICPSR 26601)

Released/updated on: 2010-01-29

Geographic coverage: United States, Florida

Time period: 1997-01-01--2007-01-01

The purpose of this study was to assess both the school-level effects and the participant-level effects of Youth Crime Watch (YCW) programs. Abt Associates conducted a four-year impact evaluation of Youth Crime Watch (YCW) programs in three Florida school districts (Broward, Hillsborough, and Pinellas Counties). School-based YCW programs implement one or more of a variety of crime prevention activities, including youth patrol, in which YCW participants patrol their school campus and report misconduct and crime. The evaluation collected both School-Level Data (Part 1) and Student-Level Data (Part 2). The School-Level Data (Part 1) contain 9 years of data on 172 schools in the Broward, Hillsborough, and Pinellas school districts, beginning in the 1997-1998 school year and continuing through the 2005-2006 school year. A total of 103 middle schools and 69 high schools were included, yielding a total of 1,548 observations. These data provide panel data on reported incidents of crime and violence, major disciplinary actions, and school climate data across schools and over time. The Student-Level Data (Part 2) were collected between 2004 and 2007 and are comprised of two major components: (1) self-reported youth attitude and school activities survey data that were administered to a sample of students in middle schools in the Broward, Hillsborough, and Pinellas School Districts as part of a participant impact analysis, and (2) self-reported youth attitude and school activities survey data that were administered to a sample of YCW continuing middle school students and YCW high school students in the same three school districts as part of a process analysis. For Part 2, a total of 3,386 completed surveys were collected by the project staff including 1,319 "new YCW" student surveys, 1,581 "non-YCW" student surveys, and 486 "Pro" or "Process" student surveys. The 138 variables in the School-Level Data (Part 1) include Youth Crime Watch (YCW) program data, measures of crime and the level of school safety in a school, and other school characteristics. The 99 variables in the Student-Level Data (Part 2) include two groups of questions for assessing participant impact: (1) how the respondents felt about themselves, and (2) whether the respondent would report certain types of problems or crimes that they observed at the school. Part 2 also includes administrative variables and demographic/background information. Other variables in Part 2 pertain to the respondent's involvement in school-based extracurricular activities, involvement in community activities, attitudes toward school, attitudes about home environment, future education plans, attitudes toward the YCW advisor, attitudes about effects of YCW, participation in YCW, reasons for joining YCW, and reasons for remaining in YCW.

Curated

School Crime Operations Package (School COP Software) (ICPSR 23543)

Released/updated on: 2008-10-09

Geographic coverage: United States

The School Crime Operations Package (School COP) is a software application developed by Abt Associates Inc. with funding from the National Institute of Justice. School COP is a free software package that persons responsible for school safety can use to enter, analyze, and map criminal incidents and school rule violations that occur in and around K-12 schools. School COP organizes information according to the data model that the United States Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics' Crime, Violence, and Discipline Reporting Task Force recommends. The School COP database includes data related to the incident (e.g., date, time, type, location) and to persons involved in the incident (e.g., name, grade, action taken). In other words, School COP is an incident-based system, rather than a student-based system. School COP offers a variety of techniques for analyzing school incidents, including tabular reports, bar graphs, pie charts, and maps. School COP can be installed on any Windows (95 or later) PC. It requires no other software to run, and is usable without formal training.

The origin of this project is an award to Abt Associates Inc. that was funded under the National Institute of Justice's (NIJ) June 1999 "Safe Schools Technology" solicitation, which requested proposals for innovative approaches to using technology to enhance the safety of our nation's elementary and secondary schools. School COP was initially released on CD-ROM in January 2001, and made available at the School COP Web site in June 2001. This Windows version of School COP was generally designed for individuals, for a single school, or for small offices within a school district. Abt Associates Inc. was subsequently awarded another grant in 2001 to enhance the School Crime Operations Package (School COP) and to conduct an evaluation of this software, which is used to enter and analyze incidents that occur on school campuses.

Two types of enhancements were made. First, an enhanced Windows version of School COP was developed that could run on a local- or wide-area network, thus allowing multiple users within a single school or across multiple schools to share a common School COP database. The enhanced Windows version also included two utilities: a Merge application (which enables a district-level School COP database to be constructed by merging several individual databases) and a Viewer application (which enables users to view -- but not add, edit, or delete -- incident information). Second, Web School COP was developed to meet the diverse information needs of persons charged with maintaining safe schools in large school districts, including persons at the school-level (e.g., principals, assistant principals, security officers, and school resource officers), the district-level (e.g., district-level administrators and security staff), as well as possibly parent organizations and state-level administrators. Web School COP was designed to run on either an Intranet (e.g., the school district's private Internet) or a secure third-party Web server, and was built to run on the current Microsoft Web platform.

The evaluation of School COP entailed case studies of six sites to address three main issues: (1) what decision process do sites go through when deciding whether to use School COP, (2) once the site decides to use School COP, what implementation obstacles exist, including those related to installation, customization, and training, and (3) what benefits do sites realize from using School COP.