Measuring Violence-Related Attitudes, Beliefs, and Behaviors Among Youths: A Compendium of Assessment Tools

This publication is no longer available in print.  It is available in electronic format only.

This compendium provides researches and prevention specialists with a set of tools to evaluate programs to prevent youth violence. This compendium is only a first step, however. New measurement tools must be developed, existing tools must be improved, and all such measures must be made available to those of you working in the field of youth violence prevention so that the vast array of prevention programs now being used can be critically reviewed and evaluated.  If you are new to the field of youth violence prevention and unfamiliar with available measures, you may find this compendium to be particularly useful.  If you are an experienced researcher, this compendium may serve as a resource to identify additional measures to assess factors associated with violence-related behavior, injuries, and deaths among youths.

Although this compendium contains more than 100 measures, it is not an exhaustive listing of available measures.  Some of the more widely used measures to assess aggression in children, for example, are copyrighted and could not be included here.   Other measures being used in the field, but not known to the authors, are also not included.  You will find that many of the measures included in this compendium focus on individuals' violence-related attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.  These measures will be particularly useful if you are evaluating a school-based program or a community-based program designed to reduce violence among youths.  Few scales and assessments address family, economic, or other community factors.  It is our goal to include such measures in future editions of this compendium.

Most of the measures in this compendium are intended for use with youths between 11 and 20 years, to assess factors such as attitudes towards violence, aggressive behavior, conflict resolution strategies, self-esteem, self-efficacy, and exposure to violence.   The compendium also contains a number of scales and assessments developed for use with children between the ages of 5 and 10 years, to measure factors such as aggressive fantasies, beliefs supportive of aggression, attributional biases, prosocial behavior, and aggressive behavior.  When parent and teacher versions of assessments are available, they are included as well.

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  Introduction
  Section 1
  Section 2
  Section 3
  Section 4