The specific aim of this proposal is to fully develop and pilot-test a youth violence prevention program for third grade children in a high-risk rural community. Designed to address developmental risk factors associated with youth violence, the proposed two-element program focuses on early aggressive behavior and rejection by peers. While there are many developmental pathways that lead to violent behavior, the early onset of aggressive, stubborn, and defiant behavior has been implicated in the development of later fighting and violence. """"""""Early start"""""""" youth use overt force to solve social problems, come from families where parent-child exchanges are coercive, demonstrate poor school adjustment, and, by approximately the third grade, begin to be rejected by their prosocial peers. Youth who are """"""""early starters"""""""" are at heightened risk for embarking on a life-course-persistent trajectory of criminal offending. These youth represent approximately six percent of the general population, but they perpetrate nearly half of all adolescent crimes, including youth violence (Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group, I 999a). Based on findings from developmental and intervention research, we have designed a school-based intervention that addresses two key risk factors for 8-9 year old children. These risk factors are poor social information processing skills, and inconsistent parental supervision and discipline. The proposed program targets children, parents, and teachers and has both universal and selective prevention elements. The Making Choices program teaches children social information processing skills and will be provided as a part of routine health studies classes to all third grade children in two rural elementary schools. The Strong Families program impacts coercive parenting practices and will be provided in two ways to parents of the third grade children. First, each school will hold fall, winter, and spring """"""""family conferences"""""""" to which all parents of third grade children will be invited. At the same time, parents of a select group of high-risk children - those who demonstrate high levels of aggression and are rejected by prosocial peers - will be further invited to multifamily groups designed to develop specific home plans related to children's school behavior. We propose a partial factorial design that permits separate estimation of the effects of Making Choices and the combination of Making Choices plus Strong Families. That is, the design will """"""""dismantle"""""""" the effects of Making Choices and Strong Families training components. Our major research hypotheses are: (a) Making Choices alone will be more effective than routine services; (b) Making Choices plus Strong Families will be more effective than Making Choices alone or routine services; and (c) program outcomes will not vary significantly by gender or race/ethnicity. We posit the third hypothesis because the Making Choices program has been developed to include: (a) content on relational aggression, a form of aggression thought to place girls at higher risk, and (b) content on attributional biases and reactive aggression, a cognitive process and form of aggression thought to place Latino and African American children at higher risk. Even though both programs have recently been manualized, we expect to tailor the programs to the unique problems confronted by schools in socially disorganized rural environments. In that regard, we will carefully document both the changes we make in the programs and the strategies we employ to engage various members of the community in family conferences and multifamily groups.
