This competitive continuation will expand on the Workplace Violence Prevention Project (WVPP), which was highly successful in its goals of designing, implementing, and evaluating a workplace violence prevention program in small retail and service businesses in the city of Los Angeles. The WVPP, which focused on decreasing robbery-related workplace violence and on calming potentially violent customers who could inflict employee injury, was implemented through an individualized program in each intervention business. Eligible business types included restaurants, bars, hotels/motels, grocery, liquor, and convenience stores. Approximately 400 intervention and 100 control businesses will be enrolled by the end of the project. An extensive review of research evaluating similar violence prevention programs found that very little is known about compliance to or long-term effects of these programs, and that few evaluations controlled for trends in crime rates. This proposed continuation will address these gaps in knowledge and explore new risks for violence in the workplace.
The specific aims are to: 1. Determine long term compliance to the intervention program through follow- up interviews to determine if programs were changed and which factors influence long-term compliance levels; 2. Extend the follow-up period to determine if program effectiveness is maintained over a long period of time and to determine the proportion of the expected decrease in workplace violence events attributable to the program by controlling for overall decreases in crime rates; 3. Correlate the level of individual store compliance to workplace violence event rates to determine the long-term relationship between compliance and outcome; 4. Build on information collected in the WVPP to examine emerging issues in workplace violence risk assessment: 4a. Determine the relationship between community-level variables and individual business characteristics in predicting workplace violence event rates, 4b. Determine the prevalence and identify risk factors for take-over compared to non- takeover robberies. Information about workplace violence event rates will be provided from computerized databases from the Los Angeles Police Department and from review of individual crime reports. The solid foundation of community contacts, data access, and field protocol created in the WVPP, as well as emerging information from preliminary data, clearly establish the need to examine longer-term outcomes and test new theories about potential areas to decrease adverse effects for employees who are victims of robbery.
| Casteel, Carri; Peek-Asa, Corinne; Greenland, Sander et al. (2008) A study of the effectiveness of a workplace violence intervention for small retail and service establishments. J Occup Environ Med 50:1365-70 |
