National Survey of Children's Exposure to Violence (NATSCEV I), Final Report

• NCJ Number: 248444
• Date Published: 2012
• Length: 63 pages
• Publication Series: OJJDP National Survey of Children’s Exposure to Violence Series
• Grant Number(s): 2006-JW-BX-0003
• Agencies: OJJDP-Sponsored
• Publication Type: Survey
• Award: National Study of Children Exposed to Violence

Annotation

The primary purpose of this project was to conduct a national study to document the incidence and prevalence of children's exposure to violence in the United States.

Abstract

This Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) funded project conducted a national study to document the incidence and prevalence of children's exposure to violence in the United States. It represents a comprehensive assessment of exposure to violence that incorporated a wide range of victimization experiences and includes children across a wide developmental spectrum. It also measured a variety of potential predictors and outcomes of children's exposure to violence. Study goals and objectives included: 1) an assessment of event characteristics, including the location of exposure, the severity of the event (e.g., whether injury resulted), the frequency of occurrence across type of exposure, the child's relationship to the perpetrator, and, in the case of witnessing, to the victim; 2) effort to document variations in incidence and prevalence exposure across gender, race, socioeconomic status, family structure, region, urban/rural residence, and developmental stage of child; 3) specify how different forms of violent victimization "cluster" or co-occur; 4) identify individual, family, and community-level predictors of violence exposure among children; 5) examine associations between levels/types of violence exposure and child mental health and delinquency behaviors; and 6) assess the extent to which children disclose incidents of violence to various individuals and the nature and source of assistance or treatment (if any) given to the child. A telephone survey methodology was used to obtain a target sample of 4,549 children ages 0-17. Survey data was collected between December 2007 and July 2008. Total sample size was 4,569, with 3,058 respondents associated with the national RDD sample (1,501 age 0-9; 1,552 age 10-17) and 1,496 respondents from an oversample of minority and low-income census tracks (954 age 0-9; 542 age 10-17).