Development and evaluation of school-based violence prevention programs

Discusses key issues in developing and evaluating school-based violence pre vention interventions. Schools provide a natural setting for implementing p rograms directed at teaching youth attitudes, knowledge, and skills to redu ce their involvement in violence. Although multitudes of these programs exi st, few have been rigorously evaluated. Developers of violence prevention p rograms need to pay particular attention to the type of violence bring addr essed, the target population, relevant risk and protective factors, and the target of the intervention. Conducting sound evaluations of such programs requires careful attention to the unit of randomization, treatment conditio ns, outcome measures, timing of data collection, and potential moderator va riables. Efforts to develop effective prevention programs can be greatly fa cilitated by adopting an action-research strategy in which evaluation findi ngs provide a basis for continual program refinement.