THE ADOLESCENT VIOLENCE SURVEY - A PSYCHOMETRIC ANALYSIS

The research on youth violence and its prevention has been hampered by the lack of adequate scales to measure violence. The Adolescent Viole nce Survey was designed to fill that need. The Survey provides a 41-it em violence scale with six subscales. The psychometric properties of t he Survey were investigated in a sample of 1374 8th and 9th graders in a central US city of moderate size. The broader violence scale had an internal consistency of .95 (Cronbach's alpha) and a test-retest reli ability of .91 (Pearson r) over a 1-week period. Subscales include sev ere menacing, menacing language, inventive violence, common violence, impulsive violence, and passive aggression. All subscales were found t o have stable factor structures, high internal consistency, test-retes t reliability, construct validity, and approximately normal distributi ons. Demographic variables, violence-related attitudes, and broader pa tterns of delinquency explained 69 percent of the variance in the viol ence composite in a stepwise multiple regression analysis; The six vio lence subscales were found to represent a typology of violence styles distinguishable by their relationships to predictor variables. These d ifferences yielded several hypotheses for future research. The Adolesc ent Violence Survey is recommended for the measurement of relatively c ommon low-to moderate-level violent behaviors within the general popul ation of middle-school and high-school aged youth.