Abstract
Objectives
This study assessed the impact of a multi-component prevention program on personal and property violence across three developmental periods (early adolescence, mid-adolescence and late adolescence/early adulthood).
Methods
The preventive intervention targeted disruptive kindergarten boys from low socioeconomic status families when they were 7 through 9 years of age. A randomized control trial was conducted to assess the impact of the preventive intervention relative to a control group.
Results
Two different approaches to data analysis were adopted: an intention-to-treat (ITT) approach and an instrumental variable (IV) approach. Results from the ITT analysis showed that the level of property violence for the intervention group was persistently lower across the three developmental periods compared to the control group. However, the intervention group did not differ from the control group on personal violence throughout adolescence and early adulthood. Results from the IV analysis generally confirmed these findings.
Conclusions
The discussion focuses on the differential effects of the prevention program on personal versus property violence.
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Notes
Because of limited resources, a little more than one out of four boys was selected to participate in the prevention group. Also, because of our interest in examining family interactions in the laboratory, the remaining boys were subdivided at a ratio of 2 to 1 into the sensitization-contact group and the no treatment-control group, respectively. This resulted in an unequal number of participants in the three groups.
We compared the prevention group (IN) boys whose teachers implemented the teacher component to those whose teachers did not but found no significant differences on any of the dependent measures examined here or in previously published studies of the MLES (i.e., post-intervention disruptiveness, friends’ deviancy, delinquent behaviors). This result, however, should be interpreted with caution in light of the weak statistical power attributable to the small size of the two subgroups of IN boys and in light of the absence of possible confounding factors such as teacher characteristics or other interventions in the classroom (which, unfortunately, we did not assess).
Given that the number of training sessions for parents depended on their success of achieving the parent component objectives, it did not seem appropriate to perform a dosage-effect analysis.
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Acknowledgments
This research was made possible by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Fonds Concerté pour l’Aide à la Recherche, the Fonds Québécois de la Recherche sur la Société et la Culture, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and the Fonds de Recherche en Santé du Québec. We wish to thank the participating families, and the authorities and directors as well as the teachers of the participating schools. We also thank Hélène Beaumont and Qian Xu for coordinating the data collection and analyses.
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Vitaro, F., Brendgen, M., Giguère, CÉ. et al. Early prevention of life-course personal and property violence: a 19-year follow-up of the Montreal Longitudinal-Experimental Study (MLES). J Exp Criminol 9, 411–427 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11292-013-9188-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11292-013-9188-x