The Justice Academy (justiceacademy.org) is pleased to announce a new research endeavor designed to facilitate a national level inquiry into the contributive factors associated with school violence. The aim of the project is to produce a risk assessment tool that can serve as a screening mechanism that seeks to provide an empirically based predictive risk assessment equation in order to anticipate the propensity of violence posed by individuals. The School Violence Predictive Model project will endeavor to isolate, quantify, and prioritize discriminant variables that perpetuate such situations and then assemble the contributive factors into primary, secondary, and tertiary levels of influence in order to create a predictive equation that can be used to determine the likelihood of individual risk to the campus community. Predicated on the findings of the national study of past cases that have occurred, it is the goal of the research team to use the collected information to create a predictive algorithm that can be employed by campus administrators in order to assess the risk of violence that each student presents campus community as well as providing a means of isolating controllable variables that minimize the risk factors associated with events proactively, based on historical analysis. As the study progresses the research team will be issuing updates and information that will allow agencies to participate in the data collection phase of the project and upon completion of the research project a final report will be issued to every agency in the country, along with instructions regarding how to access the School Violence Predictive Model. Please contact Dr. Rick Walker, Project Director at [email protected] if you have an interest in finding out more about this research project.

SVPM – Overview of the Research
SVPM – Hypothesized Variable Array