The Adolescent Violence Survey

Abstract

The research on youth violence and its prevention has been hampered by the lack of adequate scales to measure violence. The Adolescent Violence Survey was designed to fill that need. The Survey provides a 41-item violence scale with six subscales. The psychometric properties of the Survey were investigated in a sample of 1374 8th and 9th graders in a central US city of moderate size. The broader violence scale had an internal consistency of .95 (Cronbach's alpha) and a testretest reliability of .91 (Pearson r) over a 1-week period. Subscales include severe menacing, menacing language, inventive violence, common violence, impulsive violence, and passive aggression. All subscales were found to have stable factor structures, high internal consistency, test-retest reliability, construct validity, and approximately normal distributions. Demographic variables, violence-related attitudes, and broader patterns of delinquency explained 69 percent of the variance in the violence composite in a stepwise multiple regression analysis. The six violence subscales were found to represent a typology of violence styles distinguishable by their relationships to predictor variables. These differences yielded several hypotheses for future research. The Adolescent Violence Survey is recommended for the measurement of relatively common lowto moderate-level violent behaviors within the general population of middle-school and high-school aged youth.