Revisiting local responses to mass violence

Abstract

This study examines the extent to which individual and sociological factors relate to worry about mass violence, which, in this study, is investigated as worry about the recurrence of school shootings. First, it is expected that socio-demographic and vicarious event-related factors explain individual variation in worry about mass violence. Second, responses to a localized event may associate with negative perceptions of community solidarity. In addition, individual responses regarding school shootings cannot easily be separated from other forms of insecurity, such as concerns about societal disintegration (e.g. eroding moral values) and popular discussions about crime (e.g. terrorism). Two independent postal surveys were collected from the small Finnish community of Jokela approximately 6 (N = 330) and 18 (N = 278) months after the rampage school shootings in the local high school. Independent samples t tests and linear regression are used as analyses methods. Results from regression analyses of the six-month post-event responses indicate that knowing a victim of a school shooting event relates to increased worry about mass violence. Decreased perceptions of social solidarity are also associating with increased worry after controlling for other individual and sociological factors. After 18 months, both knowing a victim and having school-aged children within one’s household explain even more of the variation in worry, while perceptions of solidarity is no longer a statistically significant predictor. In addition, at both 6 and 18 months, the higher the perceptions of risks to Finnish society from social change and from crime, the higher the worry about mass violence at schools. Surprisingly, the positive association between self-reported subjective anxiety and worry about mass violence does not reach a statistical significance.

Keywords:

• school shootings
• risk
• worry about crime
• survey

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Prof. James Hawdon and Prof. Pekka Räsänen for their fruitful comments. In addition, thorough comments of the anonymous reviewer have helped to improve the manuscript. Finally, I wish to acknowledge the Emil Aaltonen Foundation for funding and Nathan Adair for language check.