The Role of Crime, Community Violence Exposure, and Perceived Neighborhood Violence in the Development of Conduct Problems Among African American Youth
Open AccessAfrican American youth are disproportionately located in neighborhoods characterized by crime and are at an increased risk for exposure to community violence and perceiving their neighborhoods to be violent. Each of these three experiences with violence has been linked with conduct problems. However, methodological problems in the existing literature limit our ability to understand whether these three types of violence differentially affect the development of adolescent conduct problems and if so, what the relative effects of these experiences with violence are. In addition, research has not examined whether the more proximal experiences with violence (i.e., community violence exposure and perceived neighborhood violence) are more useful for explaining the development of conduct problems than more distal experiences such as neighborhood crime. To address these issues, the present study examined whether neighborhood crime, community violence exposure, and perceived neighborhood violence differentially predicted youth conduct problems. Participants were an epidemiologically-defined community sample of 585 African American adolescents (53.2% male) assessed at regular intervals from elementary school through adolescence. Results revealed that each experience with violence was differentially associated with youth conduct problems, with varied effects for males and females. Understanding the effects of neighborhood crime, community violence exposure, and perceived neighborhood violence on the development of conduct problems is an initial step in the development of contextually-relevant interventions to promote healthy developmental outcomes in urban adolescents.
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