Research Department Teams Up With Community To Study High School Violence

Last year the Ontario Mental Health Foundation awarded the Research Department a grant to study violence and aggression in the relationships of high school students. Dr. Zoe Hilton is the principal investigator. The project has several components and readers might be interested in our progress.

The first part is an in-school programme for grade 11 students on violence. By completion, we will have visited most of the public high schools in Simcoe County (some several times and also some separate schools) and spoken to approximately 4,000 students and staff. A unique aspect of this enterprise is its collaborative nature.

In each area, we formed a team of experts to help us. Some experts are hospital staff but most are drawn from the local community. Our community resource people are diverse and interesting -- workers from women's shelters, rape crisis workers, public health nurses, local mental health clinicians, and police officers. Students usually attend an assembly for a large group talk and then go to one or two small workshops.

Difficulties Overcome

Students get to choose their workshops which cover such themes as: managing anger, how to help a friend (who is being abused), the role of alcohol and drugs in violence, acquaintance rape, and the role of family violence. Putting together these teams and delivering the sessions has been a huge undertaking. Many organizational difficulties have to be overcome. The credit for this achievement goes especially to Zoe Hilton who puts much patience and hard work into this.

It seems to me that this kind of community action is very consistent with initiatives toward more community focuses for our institutions. Also this kind of work raises our profile in the communities in a positive way.Because it is part of a research project, we want to measure the effect of our in-school program. School-based interventions are a popular way to stop violence. Usually, the idea is to prevent violence by changing the attitudes of young people. But few programs find out whether they do any good. That is, they do not measure to see if they have reduced violence or even if attitudes improve.

This is important because psychologists already know that deliberately trying to change someone's attitudes can cause a "backlash" -- attitudes change in the opposite direction. The goal of our program is giving information and not changing attitudes, but we believe it is crucial to measure the effect of our sessions and ensure that, at least, we are not making things worse. Toward that end, we visit the school before and after the program to assess students' experience with violence and their understanding of the material we presented.

The other big part of the High School Project is the research data we collect from the students at the beginning of each in-school program.

These data form the basis for eight separate research studies on violence in the lives of teenagers. Most studies employ an anonymous paper-and-pencil questionnaire about sexual violence, other physical violence, and verbal abuse. In some studies, we are trying to measure the prevalence of the problem (how common is it overall). We ask about the kinds of relationships in which violence occurs (dating, friendships, acquaintances or strangers). We ask about gender and violence -- our data show that boys are the most common victims and perpetrators of violence and aggression. We ask about violence in the family lives of the students. Another study examines violence in dating relationships in detail. In asking about these experiences we don't ask about verbal aggression or sexual assault per se. Rather, the questionnaires describe specific behaviours (for example, punching) and ask students about each particular behaviour separately. This way we do not require students to decide for themselves whether something was violent or abusive before they report it.

We are not using questionnaires for all the studies. Reading a description of violence on a questionnaire is pretty far removed from the actual experience of real violence. We are also asking about violence in a different way. We have transformed the paper questionnaires into a series of playlets in which actors perform short scenes portraying violence and aggression.

We recorded these scenes and will play them for the students asking them to say whether they have been involved in something similar and to tell us how they perceive the actions of the people portrayed by the actors. We will analyze these ratings and reports to see if they give results similar to the questionnaires. We also want to see if students' perceptions of these scenes are affected by their own gender and their personal experiences with violence. As you can see, the Project is ongoing. We visited four more high schools this winter. That task done, we now have a mountain of data to analyze -- we would be lost without our computers and fancy statistical software. After analyzing the data, there are reports and journal articles to write. We also want to make our findings useful to the schools and students of Simcoe County. Consequently, we will return to the schools to help them use our work. And we will approach the Board of Education with suggestions about how our results can help them tackle the problem of violence. And, of course, I will describe our results in future columns.