Evaluation of a School-Based, Universal Violence Prevention Program

Abstract

The current investigation examined the differential effectiveness of Peace Builders, a large-scale, universal violence prevention program, on male and female youth identified as low, medium, or high risk for future violence. It included eight urban schools randomly assigned to intensive intervention and wait-list control conditions. The current sample included N = 2,380 predominantly minority children in kindergarten through fifth grade. Results indicated differential effectiveness of the intervention, by level of risk; high-risk children reported more decreases in aggression and more increases in social competence in comparison to children at medium and low levels of risk. Findings add to a growing number of promising science-based prevention efforts that seek to reduce aggression and increase social competence; they provide encouraging evidence that relatively low-cost, schoolwide efforts have the potential to save society millions in victim, adjudication, and incarceration costs.