Social Supports and Youth Violence: A Cross Sectional Analysis of Chicago Youth

• In Event: Altering the Trajectories for At-Risk Youth

Abstract

Primary Prevention programs in youth violence prevention are designed to reach a broad audience by targeting generally shared problems that are associated with violence. One popular approach, is to build the social supports of youth so that they do not turn to violence to cope with problems they encounter. This framework for understanding violence is useful because it allows programs to attract a wider audience to then identify at-risk youth in the program for further resources. However, little is known about the relationship between social support from the family and school, and violent youthful offending. Furthermore, since programs are often targeted towards specific communities, more needs to be known about the relationship between community characteristics and social support in order to effectively identify communities who have youth with low social supports. Using individual-level cross-sectional analyses of 1388 youth from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods study (2001), the present research examines the relationship between social support and violent youthful offending. Findings suggest that when accounting for other predictors of youth violence, social support accounts for a small variation in violence. Additionally, demographic factors were found to have a significant, but small impact on social support.

Authors

• Sarah Ward, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

• Brian Lawton, John Jay College of Criminal Justice