The goals of the research program are (for late adolescents living in one cities of large metropolitan areas) to: 1) describe the nature and size of the relationships between exposure to community violence during the high school years and the level of psychosocial functioning: psychological symptoms, the experiencing of acute minor physical illness symptoms, and the existence of deficits in educational achievement during the immediate post high school years; 2) describe the influences of individual, family, and community variables on the level of exposure to recurring community violence; 3) identify factors that may increase the risk of, or protect the individual from, the negative impact of the exposure to violence during the high school years on post high school functioning; 4) describe the nature of the functioning or risk and protective factors. The research will use self-report survey style procedures for collecting data from an ethnoculturally diverse, convenience sample of 1800 older adolescents in NYC. Measures of most exposure to community violence, psychosocial outcomes and risk and protection variables will be multi- item additive scales that will have face content validity and reliabilities in the range of .80. The research will use multivariate correlational research design statistical procedures to test hypotheses. The general hypotheses to be tested are: 1) Level of exposure to community violence is a joint function of community, family and individual variables; 2) Exposure to community violence has an impact on level of psychosocial functioning; 3) The relationship between level of psychosocial functioning and level of exposure to community violence is negative and curvilinear; 4) Exposure to community violence will interact with other stress inducing variables in affecting the level of psychosocial functioning; 5) Certain factors increase the risk of lowered psychosocial functioning resulting from exposure to community violence, while other factors protect from debilitating impact of such exposure; 6) Variables that have been shown to moderate the effects of stress from other sources will moderate the effect of exposure to community violence on psychosocial functioning.
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