John M. Bolland

Hopelessness and risk behaviour among adolescents living in high-poverty inner-city neighbourhoods.

Ethnographic literature on inner-city life argues that adolescents react to their uncertain futures by abandoning hope, leading them to engage in high levels of risk behaviour. However, few quantitative studies demonstrate this relationship. This study tests this relationship using a survey of 2468 inner-city adolescents, asking them questions about hopelessness, violent and aggressive behaviour, substance use, sexual behaviour, and accidental injury. Nearly 50% of males and 25% of females had moderate or severe feelings of hopelessness. Moreover, hopelessness predicted of each of the risk behaviours considered. These results suggest that effective prevention and intervention programmes aimed at inner-city adolescents should target hopelessness by promoting skills that allow them to overcome the limitations of hopelessness.

Where Is the Schema? Going Beyond the “S” Word in Political Psychology

Schema theory has established wide currency today among scholars who study political attitudes, beliefs, values, recollections, or other perceptions and orientations that citizens may exhibit. How much does schema conceptualization actually contribute to understanding political behavior and attitudes? How much potential does schema theory have for future contributions? We address these questions, arguing for a more satisfying political psychology than is offered by research emanating from schema conceptualizations.

Sorting out centrality: An analysis of the performance of four centrality models in real and simulated networks

Abstract Although the concept of centrality has been well developed in the social networks literature, its empirical development has lagged somewhat. This paper moves a step in that direction by assessing the performance of four centrality models under a variety of known and controlled situations. It begins by examining the assumptions underlying each model, as well as its behavior in a community influence network. It then assesses the robustness and sensitivity of each model under conditions of random and systematic variation introduced into this network.

Gang Membership, Gun Carrying, and Employment: Applying Routine Activities Theory to Explain Violent Victimization Among Inner City, Minority Youth Living in Extreme Poverty∗

Conceptual inconsistencies in routine activities theory are illustrated by demonstrating how gang membership, gun carrying, and employment can be categorized as both risk and protective factors in a high‐poverty context. Two waves of longitudinal data from a high‐poverty sample of African American youth were used to examine the determinants of victimization risk. Bivariate analyses indicated that gang membership, gun carrying, and employment status are significant risk factors for violent victimization, but these effects were mediated by measures of lifestyles (e.g., demographic and family factors, deviant lifestyles) included as controls in the full multivariate model. In other words, the strong positive relationship between gang membership and gun carrying found in previous studies may be due to model misspecification and/or the lack of research on high‐poverty samples of inner city youth from the Deep South. Additional logistic regression analyses also indicate that the number of hours employed per week (but not employment status) is a risk factor for violent victimization. Finally, the theoretical implications of these findings for routine activities theory are discussed.

Social Connections, Trajectories of Hopelessness, and Serious Violence in Impoverished Urban Youth.

Youth living in impoverished urban neighborhoods are at risk for becoming hopeless about their future and engaging in violent behaviors. The current study seeks to examine the longitudinal relationship between social connections, hopelessness trajectories, and subsequent violent behavior across adolescence. Our sample included 723 (49% female) African American youth living in impoverished urban neighborhoods who participated in the Mobile Youth Survey from 1998 through 2006. Using general growth mixture modeling, we found two hopelessness trajectory classes for both boys and girls during middle adolescence: a consistently low hopelessness class and an increasingly hopeless class with quadratic change. In all classes, youth who reported stronger early adolescent connections to their mothers were less hopeless at age 13. The probability of later adolescent violence with a weapon was higher for boys and was associated with the increasingly hopeless class for both boys and girls. Implications for new avenues of research and design of hope-based prevention interventions will be discussed.

Hopelessness and Violence Among Inner-City Youths

Objectives: Ethnographic literature on inner-city life argues that adolescents react to their uncertain (and objectively bleak) future by abandoning hope; this, in turn, leads them to engage in risk behaviors, including violence, with considerable frequency. This study empirically measures the pervasiveness of hopelessness and uncertainty about the future among inner-city adolescents and documents the link between hopelessness, uncertainty, and risk behavior. Methods: We surveyed a sample of 583 adolescents (aged 9–19) living in public housing in Huntsville, AL; this constitutes 80% of the eligible population. Each participant in the survey received

Neighboring and Community Mobilization in High-Poverty Inner-City Neighborhoods

10. Their responses yielded empirical distributions for hopelessness, uncertainty about the future, and four violent behaviors. Using OLS regression, we examined the effect of hopelessness on these violent behaviors. Results: Hopelessness about the future was relatively rare, affecting only 20–30% of the respondents. However, it was a strong predictor of fighting and carrying a knife for females, and of carrying a knife, carrying a gun, and pulling a knife or gun on someone else for males. Uncertainty about the future was more prevalent, but unrelated to the violent behaviors. Conclusions: These results suggest that the conclusions of the ethnographic literature are only partially valid: While hopelessness is, in fact, strongly related to risk behavior, it is not nearly so prevalent as is generally assumed.

Does parenting mediate the effects of exposure to violence on violent behavior? An ecological-transactional model of community violence

This research considers how empowerment, sense of community, and neighboring behavior affect the likelihood that residents living in high-poverty neighborhoods engage in discussion about community issues (i.e., teen pregnancy, STDs, and violence) that directly affect their lives and the lives of their neighbors. The present study is conducted in homogeneous, very high-poverty (i.e., public housing) neighborhoods located in a moderate-size city. Data generated by telephone interviews with 257 public housing residents show that sense of community and neighboring behaviors, but not empowerment, are predictors of discussion about these issues, with neighboring behaviors being the most important. Neighboring behaviors also predicted working with others to solve neighborhood problems and contacting elected officials about neighborhood issues. Based on these findings, the viability of different organizing strategies that might be applied to high-poverty, inner-city neighborhoods is explored.

Are Chronic Exposure To Violence and Chronic Violent Behavior Closely Related Developmental Processes During Adolescence

Three waves of longitudinal data from a high poverty sample of 1544 African American youth were used to test an ecological-transactional model of violence. SEM analyses were conducted to determine whether parenting (Time 2) mediated the effects of exposure to violence (Time 1) on violent behaviors (Time 3). Findings supported the specified model. Multigroup SEM analyses indicated that neither family structure nor developmental stage (early versus middle/late adolescence) moderated these effects. However, exposure to violence had a larger effect on violent behaviors in female versus male youth, although the difference was simply in magnitude, not direction. A final model that predicted change scores also provided support for the hypothesized ecological-transactional model of violence.

Trajectories of adolescent alcohol use by gender and early initiation status

Five waves of longitudinal data from a sample of minority youth living in extreme poverty were used to examine the impact of chronic exposure to violence on chronic violent behavior. Given the rapid rate of developmental change during adolescence and the lack of multiyear studies of exposure to violence, semiparametric group-based modeling was used to identify trajectories of chronic exposure to violence (7% of youth), chronic violent victimization (9% of youth), chronic vicarious victimization (39% of youth), and chronic violent behavior (12% of youth). The multivariate findings revealed that (a) youth with chronic exposure to violence were 3,150% (or 31.5 times) more likely to engage in chronic violent behavior and (b) chronic vicarious victimization was a significant predictor of chronic violent behavior, after controlling for the effects of chronic violent victimization. The theoretical and policy implications of these findings as well as areas for future research are discussed.