Investigating Impulsivity as a Root Cause of School Violence: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

• In Event: Biopsychosocial Applications of Criminological Theory

Abstract

Impulsivity, or the tendency to act without careful thought, is one of the top predictors of serious school violence perpetration in the literature (Turanovic & Siennick, 2020), particularly for aggression and delinquency at school (Turanovic et al., 2019). Major gaps in the literature, however, remain. We conducted a comprehensive systematic review and meta-analysis of longitudinal associations between early impulsivity and later school violence perpetration and victimization to better understand the relevance of impulsivity as a root cause of school violence. Our literature search returned 2,536 unique citations and 52 secondary datasets containing longitudinal associations between impulsivity and subsequent school violence involvement, of which 69 published reports and 14 secondary datasets met our eligibility criteria. This talk will present preliminary findings from our systematic review and quantitative synthesis. We hypothesized that individual factors, such as impulsivity, may matter more for school violence that tends to be instigated by the individual (perpetration) and less for forms of school violence that are instigated by others (victimization). We also examined which measures and methods of assessing impulsivity are most predictive of subsequent school violence, and whether the predictive validity of impulsivity for school violence is moderated by various contexts and samples.

Authors

• Laura Michaelson, American Institutes for Research

• Joshua R. Polanin, American Institutes for Research

• Dorothy L. Espelage, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill