An article聽that details the creation of a new violence risk assessment tool in Honduras, co-authored by University of Notre Dame faculty聽and researchers聽at the and the聽 (NDIGD), has been published in the , the official, peer-reviewed journal of the .
The article, 鈥�,鈥� details the creation of the new Violence-Involved Persons Risk Assessment (VIP-RA) tool, which is聽an aggregate of seven psychometric and social risk assessment tools previously validated in various American and European contexts.
The article was co-authored by , assistant professor of psychology and peace studies;聽, senior technical associate at NDIGD;听补苍诲听, formerly a research and learning senior associate at NDIGD. The聽Kroc Institute and NDIGD are both housed within Notre Dame鈥檚 .
Miller-Graff was invited to join the NDIGD initiative because of her research on violence and its effects on mental health and well-being, although Honduras represented a new research context for her. The project seeks to move beyond identifying communities or groups at risk of crime and violence to highlight individuals who are most at risk of becoming involved in violence as either victims or perpetrators. Miller-Graff hopes that the assessment tool and research will be available not only to academic researchers, but also to聽international development practitioners.聽
"There are many great resources to support strong evaluation of programs, but given that academic papers are rarely available free of charge, a lot of important information about measures and their psychometric quality is hard to access by organizations focused on evidence-based practice and policy. Our goal was to help bridge this gap," said聽Miller-Graff. "The measures we selected have been validated and used in a wide variety of contexts, so we anticipate that they could readily be used in other countries and cultural contexts as well."
The researchers initially included eight tools as subscales within the VIP-RA tool and worked with a number of local groups and researchers to determine how best to linguistically and culturally translate the subscales for a Honduran context. The researchers then interviewed more than 1,200 young adults (ages 16-30) in Tegucigalpa over a one-month period to validate the tool.
After the survey period, the researchers removed questions from subscales that showed weak reliability or validity, reducing the original number of questions included in the VIP-RA tool from 156 to 89. Only one subscale was removed completely from the tool.
鈥淏y using previously validated tools, we wanted to see if we could identify the primary characteristics of those most at risk in high-violence contexts like Honduras,聽a country that has been consistently ranked as over the last decade,鈥澛爏aid Hare.聽
The revised version of the VIP-RA tool is able to measure several primary characteristics of at risk youth in high-violence contexts, including emotion regulation, depression, post-traumatic stress聽and resilience, among others. The researchers found that young adults involved in violence, as either victims or聽perpetrators, exhibited more signs of post-traumatic stress and depression. Additionally, the researchers found that young adults uninvolved in violence showed more signs of emotional regulation and factors associated with resilience.
鈥淚n addition to contributing to our knowledge about the characteristics of violence-involved youth in Honduras, this research and the VIP-RA tool can be used by other programs and organizations to focus their development interventions on the needs of those most at risk of becoming violence-involved,鈥� said Hare.
The article was written as part of NDIGD鈥檚 鈥溾�� project. As part of this project, NDIGD is working with and the to evaluate development interventions in Honduras that seek to increase citizen security.
Contact: Luis Ruuska, communications specialist, Notre Dame Initiative for Global Development, lruuska@nd.edu
Originally published by at on April 4.