The National Consortium on Violence Research (NCOVR) was established in response to a solicitation from the National Science Foundation that provided a grant of $12 million for five years to develop a coherent program of research on the factors contributing to serious violence. The consortium addresses these issues by a variety of projects structured at three levels: 1) individual characteristics leading to a propensity for violence, exploiting a variety of longitudinal data sets of individual self-reports; 2) situational characteristics examining violence-generating situations, with particular emphasis on the contribution of guns, intoxication, and gangs to the dynamics of an evolving situation; and 3) the influence of community characteristics such as their social-control structures that may contribute to a stimulation or inhibition of violence aside from differences in the residents of the communities.
The consortium is figured as a "virtual consortium" with about 50 members located at about 30 institutions in the U.S. and abroad. A critical infrastructure linking that community is a Data Center that will combine a variety of individual data-sets, provide the capability for linking the data-sets with common features, and provide specialized software packages for carrying out particular analyses for pursuing scientific research in the area of violence.
Important efforts are directed at examining issues that cut across these three levels. For example, NCOVR is pursuing issues that link individual victimization reports from the NCVS with the attributes of their communities, and reports of individual homicide incidents with characteristics of the surrounding community.
Research projects funded by the consortium will usually display at least one or more of the following characteristics: multi-disciplinary, multi-site, multi-level, and pursue advanced research methods.
The session will involve presentations by several of the key participants
in NCOVR reporting on the operations and the research projects and program
of the Consortium.
Richard E. Tremblay
University de Montreal, PQ, Canada
Development of Physical Aggression and its Prevention
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