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Abstract
Despite extensive literatures on the impact on children of exposure to violence in families, neighborhoods, and peer groups, there has been relatively little effort evaluating their cumulative impact. There also has been less attention to the effects of exposure to political conflict and violence. We collected data from a representative sample of 600 Palestinian youths (3 age cohorts: 8, 11, and 14 years old) to evaluate the relation of exposure to political conflict and violence, and violence in the family, community, and school, to posttraumatic stress (PTS) symptoms and aggressive behavior. Results highlight the additive effects of exposure to political conflict and violence, suggesting that interventionists should consider the full spectrum of sources of environmental risk for PTS symptoms and aggressive behavior.
Notes
1Parents of 8-year-olds provided reports of their children's exposure to ethnic-political conflict, but older children (11- and 14-year-olds) provided self-reports. We followed this strategy for two reasons. First, our Institutional Review Board had concerns about the 8-year-olds’ emotional reactions to reporting on their exposure to this type of conflict and violence. Second, given the time constraints of the interviews with young children, having parents report on these 24 items decreased the length of the interview for 8-year-olds. We computed several analyses to address the extent to which this was problematic. First, we examined whether reports of exposure to ethnic-political conflict and violence increased with age, as has been found in other research. Indeed, even though parents provided the reports for 8-year-olds and 11- and 14-year-old children provided self reports, we found the expected significant increases in exposure between each age level. Next, we reran the regression analyses controlling for reporter and found exactly the same results in the significance of our beta weights for exposure to conflict and violence across contexts. Finally, exposure to ethnic-political conflict and violence did not interact significantly with age in predicting either post-traumatic stress symptoms or aggression.
2Although the alphas for witnessing community violence are low by conventional standards, it should be emphasized that as event checklists these measures should not be expected to produce high internal reliability. The alpha coefficient assumes some underlying individual difference characteristic producing item covariation. There is not necessarily a basis for expecting that exposure to one form of violence in the community will increase the likelihood of exposure to another form of violence in the community (see, e.g., Netland, Citation2001).
Note: Means and standard deviations are based on raw scores of the variables. However, the analyses of variance were computed using log-transformed values for those variables that required this transformation.
a Aggression is a composite score derived through latent variable measurement modeling of three manifest variables. Individual scores for the three measures were standardized, multiplied by factor weights observed in the measurement model, and then averaged to create the Aggression composite.
*p < .05. **p < .01.
a Aggression is a composite score derived through latent variable measurement modeling of three manifest variables. Individual scores for the three measures were standardized, multiplied by factor weights observed in the measurement model, and then averaged to create the Aggression composite.
**p < .01.
a Sex was dummy coded (−1 = female, +1 = male).
b Age was dummy coded (−1 = 8, 0 = 11, +1 = 14).
c Parental income was coded as follows: 1 = below average to 5 = way above average.
d Parental education was the average of the two parents' levels of education: 1 = illiterate to 10 = doctorate or law degree.
e Subregion was coded as follows: 1 = West Bank, 2 = Gaza.
f Step 3 was repeated three times. Step 3a included the set of interactions of each exposure to conflict/violence variable with sex. Step 3b included the set of interactions of each exposure to conflict/violence variable with age. Step 3c included the set of interactions of exposure to political conflict/violence with each other exposure to conflict/violence variable.
*p < .05. **p < .01. †p < .10.
a Sex was dummy coded (−1 = female, +1 = male).
b Age was dummy coded (−1 = 8, 0 = 11, +1 = 14).
c Parental income was coded as follows: 1 = below average to 5 = way above average.
d Parental education was the average of the two parents' levels of education: 1 = illiterate to 10 = doctorate or law degree.
e Subregion was coded as follows: 1 = West Bank, 2 = Gaza.
f Step 3 was repeated three times. Step 3a included the set of interactions of each exposure to conflict/violence variable with sex. Step 3b included the set of interactions of each exposure to conflict/violence variable with age. Step 3c included the set of interactions of exposure to political conflict/violence with each other exposure to conflict/violence variable.
*p < .05. **p < .01. †p < .10.
