My Exposure to Violence – Revised

The My Exposure to Violence-Revised (Buka & Selner-O'Hagen, 1997) instrument has been developed for the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (Earls & Buka, 1977) requests information on exposure to 24 different types of violent events. For each type of event information is sought on the frequency of exposure, the setting in which it occurred, and the identity of victim and perpetrator. The measure has three primary scales; (1) witnessing violent events, (2) victimization, and (3) total exposure.

Abstract: My Exposure to Violence - Revised is adapted from the same measure created for the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (Buka et al., 1996). The Fast Track Project version of this revised measure collects information on a student's exposure to five types of violent events. The events include: beating, attack with a weapon, gun shot, accident or other event resulting in death or serious injury, and threat by another person with serious injury. In Year 12, My Exposure to Violence was revised to ask about violent events that had happened only within the previous two years. For each type of event, the respondent is also asked whether the event occurred at home, at school, or in the neighborhood; whether the event occurred within the past year; and whether the event occurred more than once. Response choices for all items except event frequency are "Yes (1)" and "No (0)." The item that asks for frequency of each violent event ("Has this happened once or more than once?") has the response choices "Once (1)" and "More than once (2)." This measure contains two question sets for each type of violent event. One question set elicits information from the respondent as a witness to the event. The other set asks for the same information when the respondent is a victim of a violent event. There are two subscales and a total scale. The subscales are: Witnessing Violence and Victimization. T-tests of means show significant differences between the normative and control groups for the Victimization subscore. Alpha values for the Victimization and Witnessing Violence subscores and the Total Score are good. The Victimization subscore distribution has a floor effect in both groups with 82% of scores at zero in the normative group, and 70% at zero in the control group. The distribution of the Total Score has a slight positive skew, with positive kurtosis in both the normative group and the control group. The Witnessing Violence subscore distribution is slightly positively skewed for both groups, with positive kurtosis in the normative group.

Who Completed this Measure?: select one

Cohort 1 - Administrative History

  • Year 11 | grade 10 | age 16
  • Year 12 | grade 11 | age 17

Cohort 2 - Administrative History

  • Year 11 | grade 10 | age 16
  • Year 12 | grade 11 | age 17

Cohort 3 - Administrative History

  • Year 11 | grade 10 | age 16
  • Year 12 | grade 11 | age 17

Technical Reports:

Raw Dataset Name: CyAX

Scored Dataset Name: MVRySCc

Keywords:
Guns, Physical Assault, Physical Threat, Violence, Weapons

Is this Measure Available for Public Use?: No

Obtain Measure:

Stephen Buka
Associate Professor of Society, Human Development, and Health, and of Epidemiology
Department of Society, Human Development, and Health
Kresge Building, 6th Floor
677 Huntington Avenue
Boston, MA 02115
Phone: 617-432-3870
Email: sbuka@hsph.harvard.edu