Bullying, Sexual, and Dating Violence Trajectories From Early to Late Adolescence in the Midwestern United States, 2007-2013. (ICPSR 34835)
These data are part of NACJD's Fast Track Release and are distributed as they there received from the data depositor. The files have been zipped by NACJD for release, but not checked or processed except of the removal of direct identifiers. Users should refer to the accompany readme file for a brief description of the files available with this collections and consult the investigator(s) if further information is needed.
This study tested a model of individual, familial, and peer variables that additively and synergistically increased or decreased the risk for sexual and teen dating violence based on bullying experiences in early adolescence. The study surveyed 1,162 students from three cohorts in four Midwestern middle schools, who were then followed into three high schools. Five waves of surveys collected information about the level of violence in student homes with parents and siblings or with other children, physical abuse, sexual abuse, exposure to domestic violence, frequency of bullying, self-reported delinquency, and exposure to delinquent friends during the middle school years. Waves six and seven were collected during high school and sexual violence and teen dating violence measures were added to the surveys.
Developing Knowledge About What Works to Make Schools Safe: Implementation and Evaluation of Tools for Life to Improve School Climate and Safety in Jackson Public School District, Mississippi, 2016-2018 (ICPSR 37600)
Tools for Life: Relationship-Building Solutions (TFL) is a program designed to improve school climate and safety through the proactive development of elementary and middle school students' interpersonal skills (relationship-building and communication) and intrapersonal skills (self-regulation and resiliency). In the 2016-2017 and 2017-2018 school years, the Jackson (Mississippi) Public School District (JPSD) implemented TFL in grades 1 through 8. RAND researchers conducted a randomized controlled trial to determine whether TFL, integrated into existing school practices, positively affected school climate and safety in the district.
This project described the implementation of TFL in JPSD, calculated its costs, and evaluated the program's effectiveness. TFL was designed to improve whole-school change in relationships among staff and students, but the project researchers found that implementation of TFL in JPSD schools was generally shallow, and the program was rarely, if at all, implemented across a whole school as it was designed. TFL had little impact: After one year of implementation, there were no practically or statistically significant differences between schools that implemented TFL and those that did not in measures of students' social and emotional, school climate, behavioral, or achievement outcomes. In addition to the uneven implementation of the program, methodological limitations of the study and contextual factors in JPSD may have contributed to these finding.
Effects of a Middle School Social-Emotional Learning Program on Bullying, Teen Dating Violence, Sexual Violence, and Substance Use in High School, Illinois, 2010-2016 (ICPSR 36726)
These data are part of NACJD's Fast Track Release and are distributed as they were received from the data depositor. The files have been zipped by NACJD for release, but not checked or processed except for the removal of direct identifiers. Users should refer to the accompanying readme file for a brief description of the files available with this collection and consult the investigator(s) if further information is needed.
The purpose of this was to leverage an existing randomized controlled trial of The Second Step anti-bullying program, which was implemented when the sample of students was in middle school, by measuring related aggressive behaviors (e.g. bullying, cyberbullying, sexual violence) during the high school years. The objectives of this study were to determine treatment effects of the Second Step middle school program on reductions in youth aggression (including bullying), sexual violence, substance use, and teen dating violence when in high school, as well as to assess middle school belonging as a mediator of these treatment effects on targeted problem behaviors in high school.
Demographic variables included as part of this collection are students' age, gender, race, and household characteristics. The collection contains 3 SPSS data files:
analysis4_de-identified_2.sav (n=2143; 304 variables)
RCT-WAVE-1-4-ITEMS_RECODED_de-identified_2.sav (n=4718; 741 variables)
RCT---WAVE-5-7-ITEMS_RECODED_de-identified_2.sav (n=3064; 887 variables)
Evaluation of Gender Violence and Harassment Prevention Programs in Middle Schools in Cleveland, Ohio, 2006-2007 [United States] (ICPSR 22660)
Evaluation of the Bully-Proofing Your School Program in Colorado, 2001-2006 (ICPSR 21840)
Evaluation of Violence Prevention Programs in Four New York City Middle Schools, 1993-1994 (ICPSR 2704)
Experimental Evaluation of a Youth Dating Violence Prevention Program in New York City Middle Schools, 2009-2010 (ICPSR 32901)
The study sought to measure knowledge about laws related to domestic violence and harassment, resources for help, rape myths, and skills such as conflict resolution; attitudes about the acceptability of violent, abusive, and harassing behaviors; behavioral intentions to avoid committing violent acts in the future as well as intentions to intervene when in the position of a bystander; behavioral measures about peer and dating partner physical and sexual violence experienced as a victim or perpetrator, and sexual harassment experienced as a victim or perpetrator; and other items covering a demographic profile of the students and questions on prior attendance at an educational program about sexual assault, harassment, or violence, and prior history of dating.
Researchers randomly assigned a school-based intervention to 6th and 7th grade classes (over 2,500 students) in 30 public middle schools in New York City to one of four conditions: (1) a classroom-based intervention; (2) a school-wide intervention; (3) interventions that included both classroom and school-wide components; or (4) a (no treatment) control group. The classroom based intervention was delivered through a six session curriculum that emphasized the consquences for perpetrators of domestic violence and harassment, state laws and penalties for domestic violence and harassment, the construction of gender roles, and healthy relationships. The school-wide intervention included the development and use of temporary school-based restraining orders, higher levels of faculty and security presence in areas identified by students and school personnel as unsafe "hot spots", and the use of posters to increase awareness and reporting of domestic violence and harassment to school personnel. Pencil and paper surveys were distributed to students at three different times: (1) immediately before the assignment to one of the four study conditions, (2) immediately after the treatment (or control condition) was completed, and (3) between five and six months after assignment to one of the four study conditions. The surveys took about 40 minutes to complete and were completed in the classroom during one class period.
Impact Evaluation of Complementarities Between Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) and Restorative Justice, Maryland, 2018-2021 (ICPSR 38863)
Across the United States (U.S.), school districts have grappled with how to create safe community- and achievement-oriented schools and how to ensure the necessary discipline is applied transparently, fairly, and without bias. Two programs that many schools have turned to in order to achieve these goals are Schoolwide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) and Restorative Justice (RJ). PBIS is an evidence-driven schoolwide behavioral management approach that aims to outline clear expectations for students and to cultivate shared norms and practices across classrooms and school spaces. PBIS has become a popular approach in schools and districts: as of 2020; over 19,000 schools in the U.S. have implemented PBIS.
A second program, Restorative Justice (RJ), has grown in popularity in recent years. RJ typically focuses on restorative relationship building between affected parties, peaceful reconciliation, and non-punitive approaches to rectifying harm, using a structured circle discussion format. RJ schools use both community circles, designed to build a safe space for students and staff to share and listen to each other, and restorative circles, designed to share perspectives on and redress a behavioral issue.
Working with a large school district in a mid-Atlantic state, researchers set out to test whether these two programs substitute for or complement each other. In partnership with the school district researchers conducted two separate school-level randomized controlled trials (RCTs). The first RCT (RCT 1) sought to uncover the marginal impact of RJ by adding the program to a set of randomly selected schools that were already implementing PBIS. The second RCT (RCT 2) was designed to discover the impact of introducing both programs together into schools that had neither program at baseline. Researchers conducted student and staff surveys to collect measures of school climate, teacher logs to record program implementation, and researchers also received administrative data from the district on student test scores, teacher and student absences, student disciplinary infractions, and school costs.
There is growing evidence of the effectiveness of each of these programs in isolation. A recent meta-analysis of 32 experimental and quasi-experimental impact studies of PBIS found that PBIS reduced disciplinary exclusions and problem behavior and increased academic achievement. The findings were statistically significant and showed small to medium effect sizes. Individual studies have found that PBIS reduces the use of office disciplinary referrals and other exclusionary disciplinary measures (including the use of in-school and out-of-school suspensions), while improving student behavior and attitudes across school levels. Individual studies show variable--some statistically significant and some null--impacts on academic outcomes.
The empirical evidence on the effect of RJ in U.S. schools is more limited, with little rigorous casual evidence published to date. Based on patterns across rigorous and non-rigorous research, restorative justice is associated with decreases in suspension rates and disciplinary disparities, improved student behavior, and improved school climate and relationships.
Impact Evaluation of Youth Crime Watch Programs in Three Florida School Districts, 1997-2007 (ICPSR 26601)
Implementing Restorative Justice in Rhode Island Schools, 2015-2018 (ICPSR 37432)
Since 2008, the Youth Restoration Project (YRP) and the Central Falls School District (CFSD) in Rhode Island have collaborated to implement a multi-level restorative justice intervention focused on building partnerships among police, schools, social services, families, and communities through training and dialogue. Restorative justice (RJ) encompasses a broad framework of practices aimed at repairing harm and achieving accountability rather than imposing punishment. In criminal justice contexts, RJ models include victim-offender mediation, peer courts, and RJ conferences. The current project undertaken by the Urban Institute focused on evaluating the impact of restorative justice conferences conducted by the YRP in partnership with Family Services of Rhode Island. A restorative justice conference (RJC) is a highly structured, facilitated meeting that allows affected parties (e.g., offending student, victim, teacher) and their allies (e.g., parents/guardians, peers) to arrive at the best possible solution for all parties following a negative event or behavior. Three different types of student misbehavior were considered for referral to restorative conferencing as an alternative to more formal processes: (1) arrestable offenses (with or without victims), (2) chronic unexcused absenteeism (truancy), or (3) chronic disruptive behavior.
The Urban Institute began implementing a conference observation pilot in a CFSD middle school and high school in fall 2014; the 2015-2016 school year was the first full year of implementation. Starting in 2016-2017, a middle school and high school in Providence also participated; conference observations were also conducted in a charter high school in the area. At these 5 schools between 2015-2016 and 2017-2018, 786 cases were referred for RJ conferencing; conferences were held in about half of these cases (379). A total of 105 conferences were observed by trained field staff. Post-conference interviews were conducted in the months following RJCs and allowed adult conference participants to share feedback regarding their experience and satisfaction with the conference process. Additionally, an outcome evaluation was conducted using student administrative data to assess the impact of conferences on student behavior. Finally, teacher surveys and focus groups were conducted in 4 participating schools to assess teacher perceptions of overall school climate as well as attitudes toward restorative practices and RJCs.
This collection includes data from restorative justice conference observation (DS1) and teacher surveys (DS2). Administrative data from the outcome evaluation and qualitative data from post-conference interviews and teacher focus groups were not deposited and are not included in the ICPSR release.
Improving School Safety in the District of Columbia: Evaluating the Safe School Certification Program, 2016-2020 (ICPSR 37892)
Mapping the School to Prison Pipeline in North Carolina, 1972-2016 (ICPSR 38141)
This project was centered on the apparent tension between keeping schools safe and keeping students attached to school. The project used comprehensive administrative data from the North Carolina public school system available through the North Carolina Education Research Data Center (NCERDC).
This dataset, along with juvenile court record data and publicly-available data from the North Carolina adult criminal justice system, linked administrative information from the same individuals in both school disciplinary records and the juvenile and adult criminal justice systems. The ultimate goal of this project was to determine if different policy choices by schools causally decrease rates of in-school violence in the short run and/or increase rates of conviction and incarceration in the long term.
A Randomized Controlled Trial Of A Comprehensive, Research-Based Framework for Implementing School-Based Law Enforcement Programs, Texas, 2017-2020 (ICPSR 38263)
The purpose of this study was to evaluate a comprehensive, research-based framework of recommended practices for integrating police into the educational environment. This research tested use of a multi-faceted school-based law enforcement (SBLE) framework to determine how the framework contributes to multiple outcomes. The objectives for this study were to: (1) implement a randomized controlled trial to test a comprehensive framework for SBLE involving 25 middle and high schools; (2) assess the impacts of this framework on student victimization and delinquency, use of exclusionary discipline practices (e.g., suspension, expulsion), school climate measures, and student-officer interactions; and (3) disseminate tangible findings that can immediately be translated into practice and further research in schools nationwide.
A Roadmap to Evidence-Based School Safety: Safe Communities Safe Schools, Colorado, 2016-2020 (ICPSR 37913)
Researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder's Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence (CSPV) partnered with educators in 46 middle schools to implement Safe Communities Safe Schools (SCSS). SCSS seeks to prevent and reduce behavioral incidents, address mental and behavioral health concerns, and increase prosocial behavior in the school setting through three core program components: developing a functioning multidisciplinary school team, building capacity around data use, and selecting and implementing evidence-based programs. The study explored research questions in three areas: readiness (whether schools met baseline criteria and experienced changes in readiness over time), implementation (whether the SCSS model was implemented as intended; whether it is feasible, acceptable, and effective when implemented schoolwide), and associated outcomes (effects on school climate, safety, related behavioral and mental health indicators, and academic outcomes). To explore questions in these three areas, CSPV and external evaluators from American Institutes for Research conducted a mixed-methods randomized control trial with a staggered implementation design using qualitative data (open-ended questions on implementation surveys, focus groups) and quantitative data (staff and student school climate data, attendance/truancy rates, and suspension rates, and academic achievement data).
This collection is organized into 12 parts and includes administrative school record data, student and staff climate surveys, and fidelity data. School record data from years 1 and 2 of the study include school-level attendance, truancy, and suspension rates, as well as student-level assessment data. Qualitative focus group data is not currently included in the collection.
School Crime Operations Package (School COP Software) (ICPSR 23543)
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.
School Culture, Climate, and Violence: Safety in Middle Schools of the Philadelphia Public School System, 1990-1994 (ICPSR 2026)
Shelby County School District Comprehensive School Safety Initiative, Tennessee, 2017-2020 (ICPSR 39092)
This study used a school-randomized design to evaluate the implementation, outcomes, and cost-effectiveness of two school safety strategies in Shelby County Middle Schools (SCMS). The school safety strategies were evaluated in terms of cost, cost-effectiveness, reduction in student violence and misbehavior, and the minimization of the severity of negative outcomes. Schools were randomly assigned into three groups. One group received Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) representing the treatment as usual (TAU) control group. The second group received student-focused school safety (SFSS) interventions. The third group received comprehensive school safety (CHSS) strategies.
Teacher Victimization: Understanding Prevalence, Causation, and Negative Consequences in a Large Metropolitan Area in the Southwestern United States, 2016-2019 (ICPSR 37295)
For Waves 1 and 2 (2016-2017), the two-year longitudinal research examined the prevalence of seven different types of teacher victimization, its negative consequences among victimized teachers, and predictors of aggression directed against teachers. The research, using a stratified multistage cluster sampling design, surveyed 1,628 middle and high school teachers in 14 school districts, located in a large metropolitan area in the southwest region of the United States. Two waves of the longitudinal research collected 1) teachers' socio-demographic factors, 2) teacher classroom management styles, and 3) school climate factors which are related to teacher victimization. Also, the data contained characteristics of victimization, school responses to teacher victimization, and negative consequences of teacher victimization.
Waves 3 and 4 (2018-2019) explored the trends and patterns of different types of teacher victimization focusing on victimizations via verbal abuse and non-physical contact aggression. They also examined the percentage of teachers reporting victimizations to school administrators, school responses to teacher victimization, and satisfaction with school handling of victimization incidents. Finally, Waves 3 and 4 investigated the effect of procedural justice on 1) victimized teachers' satisfaction with school responses, 2) physical distress, and 3) emotional distress.
Users should refer to the data collection notes field below for additional information about study citation.
Violent Incidents Among Selected Public School Students in Two Large Cities of the South and the Southern Midwest, 1995: [United States] (ICPSR 2027)
Wisconsin School Violence and Bullying Prevention Study, 2015-2017 (ICPSR 37228)
The Wisconsin School Violence and Bullying Prevention Study sought to understand the impact of comprehensive bullying prevention programs on outcomes related to violence, safety, and bullying rates. This study focused on 24 middle schools (grades 6 to 8) in Wisconsin.
To examine the effectiveness of the school's current anti-bullying program, the Bullying Prevention Program Assessment tool (BPPAT) was completed at the end of the school year. The BPPAT focused on administrative policy and procedures geared towards students, faculty, parents, or administrators. This tool examined the following items: policy and procedures, program implementation, staff training, parental education and communication, student training, reporting systems, and continuous quality improvement (CQI). Students and faculty were given surveys to determine bullying rates and perceptions of school safety. The school safety survey was given to all students concerning their bullying victimization and perception of school safety. This survey contains the following demographic variables: age, sex, grade, and race. The verified bullying incident data contains incident reporting from faculty, which focused on the type of bullying and the demographics of the perpetrator and victim. After new bullying prevention programs were implemented, students were given the safety and bullying victimization survey which focused on perceptions of bullying and school safety.
The number of bullying incidents, number of student victims and perpetrators, and the demographic characteristics of victims and perpetrators were retained in aggregate form for each school were submitted to the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) for analysis.