Efficacy Study of a Primary Intervention School Violence Program

Abstract

School violence is a significant public health problem and the lack of prevention and control strategies can have a major negative impact on the health of the young generation. The goal of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of a prevention and reduction program among middle-school students. The Anti-Violence Program in School is based on "Program Achieve. You Can Do It!" of Bernard to which a component for parents was added. The questionnaire for evaluating violent behavior was filled out before and after the implementation of the Anti-Violence program by a number of 264 students (122 – experimental group; 142 – control group) with an age ranging from 10 to 14 years old. The students were from two middle-schools from Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Despite obtaining an effect size of low intensity or at most medium, the results of the study still have the expected direction. It was pointed out a downward trend on the experimental group and an upward trend on the control group in the posttest stage comparing to pretest stage regarding the frequency of different forms of violent manifestations. Employing the Anti-Violence Program on a longer period of time could increase the program’s efficacy.