Exposure to community violence has become endemic to life in the inner cities for most youth. Evidence suggests the negative psychological and behavioral effects of trauma associated with exposure to violence. It is at the entrance to adolescence when many children experience greater unstructured and unsupervised time which puts them at risk for exposure to violence. As children enter adolescence, exposure may form a pivotal, """"""""tipping"""""""" experience that sets them on a path of more exposure and participation in violence as well as other behavioral and psychological difficulties. The goal of this project is to 1) examine and identify what types of contexts outside of school would be considered contexts of risk for exposure to violence and which are protective, to 2) examine both the acute and sustained effects of exposure to violence on psychological and behavioral well-being, and to 3) examine the full model of bidirectional influences among all the constructs. The use of a time sampling method, the Experience Sampling Method (ESM), will allow us to examine the immediate daily experience of both """"""""risky contexts"""""""", """"""""protective contexts"""""""", violence, and the trauma associated with exposure to violence. The project will follow 200 African American young adolescent urban youth from the sixth through the eighth grade. The focus will be on youth living on the margins of poverty and in poor neighborhoods. A combination of traditional hierarchial multiple regressions, structural equation modeling, and multilevel (ML) regressions will be utilized to test our hypotheses. Analyses will examine causal relations both at the immediate, daily and hour to hour level, and the year to year level. This project will directly benefit social policy by identifying what types of time are associated with risk of exposure to violence and establishing a causal relationship to specific emotional symptoms. Scientific evidence that certain types of time are causally related to increased risk will strengthen the case for programs that provide alternatives for youths' time and will provide valuable information for policy makers and legislators considering policies aimed at influencing adolescents' time.
