Term Paper on "Rosenthal & Wilson the Blight of Urban"

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Rosenthal & Wilson

The blight of urban violence and underachievement has become a major issue in sociology and education over the last decades, for --cliched as it may sound -- there seems to be a vicious cycle of violence, lack of education, and poverty. The recent article "Impact of exposure to community violence and psychological symptoms on college performance among students of color," by Beth Spenciner-Rosenthal and Cody Wilson, focused on delineating or denying the causal link between chronic youthful exposure to violence in the community (defined as violence which was either directly witnessed or experienced by the individual), psychological distress experienced in the first semesters of college, and successful academic performance during the first three college semesters.

The study concluded that exposure to violence was not directly correlated with academic performance, but that psychological distress was correlated both with exposure to violence and with a lack of school persistence (though not with decreased grade point average), creating a secondary mediated link between exposure to violence and academic performance indicators which included school persistence. Put simply, the study found that the following elements of its hypothesis were all true: "(1) there is a high level of exposure to chronic community violence for some adolescents; (2) exposure to community violence has a large impact on level of psychosocial adjustment; and (3) the presence of psychological distress impairs academic performance [specifically school persistence]." (Rosenthal&Wilson)

Rosenthal and Wilson limited their measure to City University of New York, "a p

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ublic, nonresidential, four-year college in New York," (Rosenthal & Wilson) where they sampled 385 students of color, all traditional first year students. The measurement techniques used were both straightforward and prone to accuracy and clarity: an additive scale was formed when students were asked to self-report their experiences with violence during high school, and to answer questions about the symptoms of psychological distress which they currently suffered; three semesters later academic performance in terms of school persistence and grade point average were evaluated from student transcripts.

One of the few significant problems which seem evident in the measures and definitions used in this study was the insistence by the researchers that violence within established families or relationships should not be included in the measure of environmental violence, even though increases in domestic violence have often been linked to poverty, and it may be difficult to separate the effects of domestic and external violence in an affected teen. The second possible problem is the researcher's limitation of environmental violence to that which was experienced or witnessed firsthand. It seems that some leeway should have been granted for violence which had a striking affect on the individual without having been witnessed firsthand, such as the death or brutalization of a friend or family member when the individual was not present.

It is worth mentioning that school and college climate is particularly relevant to this study, in fact high school climate is to some degree precisely what is being measured by this work, and the climate and setting of the college is necessary to an understanding and qualification of the results. In terms of high school climate, one must understand that all of the subjects in this study came from urban New York schools, so that violence was preponderant in their childhood setting. The violence which is discussed in this scale is a far cry from mere bullying, "The items measure the degree to which the respondent was chased, threatened, slapped, mugged, stabbed, shot, or had something taken by force or threat, as well as the degree to which the respondent directly observed another individual being chased, arrested, threatened, mugged, slapped, wounded, stabbed, shot, or killed, or observed someone with a gun or saw someone dead." (Rosenthal & Wilson) the high school climate was additionally, in most cases, likely to be preponderantly peopled with minorities of lower socioeconomic status. Outside understanding of the world, applied to this research, would acknowledge the likelihood that these schools were not only dangerous but also dangerously underfunded, and one suspects that lack of funding, textbooks and dedicated, interested teachers might add to the severity of the situation.

The college climate is not quite so relevant to an understanding of the meaning of chronic violence or resulting psychological scarring, as one suspects that (not being compulsory) there is a significantly reduced risk of violence on campus. The college climate is, however, still highly relevant in that it may affect the outcome of distressed and underclass students in a nonstandard way. According to Rosenthal & Wilson, most campuses do not have a sufficiently large number of young urban people of color in their numbers to make such a study feasible -- this particular New York school was chosen because it had a uniquely large population of students who were from a poor, ethnic, urban area. This situation obviously made the study far easier to conduct, considering that it supplied an appropriate number of comparative students.

This urban college climate may also have created results which were somewhat dependent on the environment of the school. This is obviously a school which is adapted to fit the needs of poor, ethnic, and urban adolescents -- no doubt teachers, faculty, and programming is designed to maximize the success of such students, and graded coursework is adapted to naturally follow from local high school curriculum and to spring from localized cultural standards. Thus, the experience of a battle-scarred urban youth in an urban college might be nothing like the experiences of that same youth were her or she to go to a more suburban college with a primarily white student and faculty population which was not prepared to make accommodations for the individual's different cultural and educational background. (This is not to imply that such schools are "dumbed down" or less serious than primarily white schools! Rather, that schools which are geared for white youth may under-serve black youth, particularly those who have adapted to an aggressive urban climate or who have to deal with the psychological distress of escaping such a climate) it is possible that in a school system less adapted to their needs, urban youth would experience a closer correlation between the degree of experienced violence/psychological distress and grade point average.

As the preceding exploration of the affect of school environment on the study suggests, a great deal of care was taken with this study to normalize race, age, and socioeconomic status (SES). However, despite the fact that the majority of students were of a similar background, there were still certain significant differences. Luckily, Rosenthal and Wilson kept scrupulous track of the percentages of various groups in their study. All students were between 16 and 20 years of age, with the median and modal age being 18. "Students of color" in the title does not refer specifically to African-American students -- only 50% of the students were African-American, with the remaining sample divided between 25% Latino/Hispanic, 9% Asian, 13% Other or mixed, and 3% Caucasian. A preponderance of the students (70%) were female. The economic status of the group was slightly below the median for the state, with a median of $30,000. A third of the students had parents who had not graduated from high school, though all of the students themselves had both graduated from High School and attended High school full time in New York. In terms of living situation, 46% of the students lived with both of their parents, 38% lived with a single parent, 13% stayed with extended family, and 3% were staying in "other" situations such as with a spouse, in foster care, or by themselves. This sample was said to be typical of the rest of the college make-up, other than the relative youth of the sample (the school has a large number of adult students).

Despite the care taken by Rosenthal and Wilson to document this fine sociological data on their subjects, they somehow failed to use it in further analysis. Unfortunately, the difference between young men and women who have witnessed violence is not explored here, as sex differences in data results are not explored. Additionally, the difference between different races and cultures and economic status is not cross-referenced with the final results. This failure somewhat weakens the papers arguments regarding these issues.

Though this paper is a solid work of sociological research, it does not go very far beyond descriptive research into issues of causation, prevention, or intervention. One must dig below the surface of this research in order to apply it practically to the pursuit of social betterment. Perhaps the easiest part of this challenge to successfully pursue would be the topic of causation and the placement of blame for the problem. Of course, the question "Who is to blame for the violence of urban culture?" is overwhelmingly dogged by rhetoric and is unlikely to be easily answered, let alone touched by this research. So while it is easiest and most obvious to blame the lack of school persistence among students on violence… READ MORE

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Quoted Instructions for "Rosenthal and Wilson the Blight of Urban" Assignment:

“

For the article below, please provide a review that includes the following;

1. Incidence rates (measurement issues, definitional issues, perceptions)

2. Causation (who is blamed is another way to look at this)

Prevention efforts (evidence of effectiveness ¡V for whom, under what conditions)

3. Intervention (what level - 1-1, group, policy; evidence of effectiveness ¡V see above; ramping up?)

4. School/college climate issues (if they apply)

Concept of victimization

5. What do we know regarding race, sex, age, SES

Impact of exposure to community violence and psychological symptoms on college performance among students of color

Author: Rosenthal, Beth Spenciner; Wilson, W Cody Source: Adolescence 38, no. 150 (Summer 2003): p. 239-249 ISSN: 0001-8449 Number: 437778361 Copyright: Copyright Libra Publishers Incorporated Summer 2003

ABSTRACT

This study examined longitudinal relationships among exposure to chronic community violence during high school, psychological distress during the first semester of college, and academic performance during the first three semesters of college. The sample comprised 385 students of color in a large city. Exposure to community violence and psychological distress were measured with additive scales; academic performance (school persistence, grade point average) was obtained from transcripts. It was found that exposure to community violence and academic performance were not related; exposure to community violence and psychological distress were related; psychological distress and college persistence were related; and psychological distress and grade point average were not related. The findings are consistent with the causal chain model; specifically, that the effects of exposure to community violence in high school on academic performance in college are mediated by psychological distress.

This paper is concerned with the longitudinal relationships among exposure to chronic community violence during the high school years, the level of psychological distress manifested during the first semester of college, and academic performance during the first three semesters of college. The concern stems from a set of three widely held assumptions: (1) there is a high level of exposure to chronic community violence for some adolescents; (2) exposure to community violence has a large impact on level of psychosocial adjustment; and (3) the presence of psychological distress impairs academic performance.

The first two of these assumptions led to the identification of exposure to chronic community violence as a public health problem among adolescents in the early 1990s (Centers for Disease Control, 1993; Earls, 1992; Hausman, Spivak, & Prothrow-Stith, 1994; Koop & Lundberg, 1992; Reiss, 1993; Richters, 1993; Shalala, 1993). Recent findings indicate that adolescents do have considerable exposure to chronic community violence: an estimated one and three-quarter million Americans aged 12 years and over were victims of nonsexual, nonfatal crimes according to the National Crime Victims Survey of 1998 (Rennison, 1999); the likelihood of being a victim of personal crime is greater for adolescents, for individuals living in a large urban center, for poor individuals, and for Blacks (Rennison, 1999); and adolescents of high school age have much more exposure to robbery and assault than do younger adolescents and adults (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1994; Lowry, Sleet, Duncan, Powell, & Kobler, 1995; Rand, 1998). Empirical evidence is also beginning to accumulate indicating that exposure to community violence is related to posttraumatic psychological distress among high school and beginning college students in urban settings (Rosenthal, 2000; Rosenthal & Wilson, 2001).

The empirical evidence regarding the third assumption, however, is sparse (Heiligenstein, Guenther, Hsu, & Herman, 1996) and the relationship between general psychopathology and academic performance among college students has not been established (Brackney & Karabenick, 1995). Indeed, recent evidence is conflicting: two studies found a small but statistically significant negative correlation between depression and same-semester grade point average (GPA) among college students (Fazio & Palm, 1998; Haines, Norris, & Kashy, 1996), but three studies found no relationship between psychological distress and same-semester GPA (Svanum & Zody, 2001; Trice, Holland, & Gagne, 2000; Trockel, Barnes, & Egget, 2000).

This set of three assumptions (adolescents have high levels of exposure to community violence, exposure to community violence produces psychological disturbance, and psychological distress impairs academic performance) implies a causal chain model, with psychological distress mediating the relationship between exposure to community violence and academic performance. The model leaves open the issue of whether there is a direct relationship between exposure to community violence and academic performance, or only the indirect relationship mediated by psychological distress. The hypotheses investigated in the present study were as follows: (1) the amount of exposure to chronic community violence in high school is related to academic performance during the first and second years of college, and (2) the level of psychological symptoms reported by beginning first-year college students is related to academic performance in the first and second years of college.

The empirical findings reported above, that exposure to community violence is especially concentrated among poor adolescents from ethnic minority groups living in a large urban area, suggest that the phenomena we are interested in will most fully manifest themselves within a special subgroup of the larger American population: students of color. Walden (1994) has pointed out that the proportion of people of color in most studies of college students is too small to warrant drawing conclusions about this category of students. The general lack of research devoted to ethnic minority adolescents has also been noted (Kagawa-Singer, 1996; Kotelchuck, 1996; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1991). Therefore, the present study focused on a student population with a high proportion of members who belong to minority ethnic and racial groups, and who attended high school in a large city.

METHOD

Research participants were enrolled in classes typically taken by beginning first-year college students. They responded during class to written questions about their exposure to community violence during high school and about the level of psychological distress (i.e., symptoms) that they were experiencing at present. Data about school performance were collected three semesters later, with the students' permission, from college transcripts. The research was approved by the college's Institutional Review Board; the students were informed of the purpose and nature of the research, that participation was voluntary, that information would be obtained from their transcripts, and that all information would be kept confidential. Ninety-five percent of the students in attendance at the classes in which data collection occurred agreed to participate.

Sample

Participants were drawn from a public, nonresidential, four-year college in New York City during the 1997-98 and 1998-99 academic years. Only those students who had attended high school in New York City and who were of traditional age for first-year college students (the modal, median, and mean ages for the sample were all 18 years, with a range from 16 to 20) were included in the sample (N = 385). Approximately 50% were Black/African American, 25% Latino/Hispanic, 9% Asian, 3% White, and 13% other. Seventy percent were female; 65% had parents who were high school graduates; and the sample's median household income was $30,000 (the median household income for New York State at that time was approximately $36,000; Pew Center on the States, n.d.). Sixty percent had been born in the U.S.; but of those not born in the U.S., all had received most of their schooling in the U.S. Approximately 46% lived in two-parent households, 38% lived in one-parent households, 13% in extended households, and 3% were in other living situations. The sample was similar, in terms of sociodemographic characteristics, to the population of students at this college (City University of New York, 1997), except that it was younger; the college where the study was conducted has a substantial number of adults returning to school, and these students were excluded from the sample.

Measures

Exposure to community violence. Information on exposure to community violence was collected using a multi-item additive scale developed to reflect exposure to nondomestic, nonsexual, non-singular-event community violence (Rosenthal & Wilson, 2001). This scale is based on a questionnaire developed by Richters and Saltzman (1990) for the National Institute of Mental Health; however, the scale used in this study covers a narrower range of types of violence, asks about exposure during a specific time period (the prior three years, i.e., the high s38, no. 150 (Summer 2003): p. 239-249chool years), and uses fewer response categories to reflect frequency of exposure. The items in the scale reflect either being a direct victim of community violence or personally witnessing another being a victim of such violence. The directions state that the respondent is not to report violence that occurred in his or her own household and not to report secondhand descriptions of violence. The items measure the degree to which the respondent was chased, threatened, slapped, mugged, stabbed, shot, or had something taken by force or threat, as well as the degree to which the respondent directly observed another individual being chased, arrested, threatened, mugged, slapped, wounded, stabbed, shot, or killed, or observed someone with a gun or saw someone dead. Examples are: "During the past three years, how many times has someone taken something from you (for example, cash or property), using force or threat of force?" and "During the past three years, how many times have you seen someone else getting beaten up or mugged?" The response options are: "never" (coded 1), "once or twice" (coded 2), "several times" (coded 3), and "very often" (coded 4). Response weights are summed across the 18 items to form a single common factor scale that is quasi-interval, with scores ranging from 18 to 72. The scale has face validity in that the items reflect the definition of the scale. Internal consistency was good (Cronbach's alpha = .88).

Psychological distress. Psychological distress was measured by the 25 items comprising the dysphoria domain of Briere's (1995) Trauma Symptom Inventory (TSI). Each item is a brief phrase reflecting a feeling state, with the respondent asked to report the frequency of experiencing each feeling during the past two months: "never" (coded 1), "seldom" (coded 2), "sometimes" (coded 3), or "often" (coded 4). The weighted responses to each of the items in the scale are summed to form a single common factor scale that is quasi-interval in nature, with scores ranging from 25 to 100. The 25 items reflect feelings of anxiety, autonomic hyperarousal, depressed mood, depressed cognitions, angry mood, or irritable affect. Examples of items are: "trouble controlling your temper," "feeling jumpy," and "feeling depressed." A score of 74 or higher is considered clinically significant. The TSI was standardized on a national population aged 18 years and older. The dysphoria scale possesses criterion validity in that it differentiated between the standardization sample and a sample of psychiatric inpatients and outpatients, with a large effect size (Briere, 1995). The scale has face validity as a measure of psychological distress. Internal consistency for the sample used in this study was high (Cronbach's alpha = .95).

Academic performance. Academic performance may be indexed by grades and by persistence in attending school. Information about both school persistence and grade point average was obtained from students' transcripts.

An index of school persistence was obtained in the following manner: in the second semester following the one in which the student filled out the questionnaire (actually, the student's third semester of potentially continuous registration), the student's transcript was examined. If the student's transcript showed that he or she had registered for three continuous semesters, the student was considered a "persister"; if the transcript indicated that the student had not registered for all three semesters, the student was considered a dropout or "nonpersister."

GPA was obtained by examining the student's transcript for each of the first two semesters of the student's potential enrollment, including the semester in which he or she filled out the questionnaire. The GPA for each of the semesters was copied from the transcript.

Reliability of the two measures of academic performance was tested by reviewing the transcripts twice, with the two reviews done by different individuals. The results of the two reviews were in agreement 97% of the time. The few disagreements arose in the area of rounding GPAs. When a disagreement between the two reviews occurred, the information in question was examined a third time by the two reviewers and the disagreement resolved.

Research Design

The hypotheses were tested using an observational research design (no variables were experimentally manipulated) and correlational statistical procedures. The study was longitudinal, however, with data being collected at two different times. Indeed, there were three time frames: the first data collection involved a retrospective report on level of exposure to community violence during the preceding three years, and a current report on level of psychological distress; the second data collection occurred one year later when school records on GPA and persistence were examined. The results may be tentatively interpreted in terms of effects over time.

RESULTS

Distributions of Variables

The mean score on the exposure to violence scale was 28.0, with a standard deviation of 6.9. The distribution of scores was positively skewed. Only 2.6% of the sample had never been exposed, during high school, to any of the types of violence in the scale. The median level of exposure was to have experienced half the scale items "once or twice"; 12% of the sample had exposure equivalent to, or greater than, having observed the types of violence in all the scale items "once or twice" and at least one scale item "several times" during high school. The level of exposure to community violence during high school on the part of these first-year college students was similar to the level of exposure of other inner-city high school students (Rosenthal, 2000; Singer, Anglin, Song & Lunghofer, 1995). The data, then, are consistent with the first assumption (that adolescents living in urban areas have considerable exposure to community violence).

The mean score on the psychological distress scale was 54.3, with a standard deviation of 16.5. The distribution of scores was positively skewed. The scores covered essentially the entire possible range of the scale-from 25 to 98. The mean score on psychological distress for this sample was slightly higher (roughly one-third standard deviation) than the mean score for the nationally representative normative sample of adults. Approximately 15% of the sample of college students had scores that would be considered clinically significant (Briere, 1995).

The mean GPA for the sample in the first semester was 2.46 (on a scale from 0.00 to 4.00), with a standard deviation of .85; the mean GPA for those who completed the second semester was 2.24, with a standard deviation of .87. For both, the distributions were negatively skewed.

Of the 385 students who started the first semester, 273 (or 70.9%) also registered for the third semester. Of the 112 who had dropped out by the third semester, 13 did not finish the first semester, 41 finished the first semester but did not register for the second semester, 14 dropped out during the second semester, and 44 finished the second semester but did not register for the third semester.

Correlations Between Variables

The correlation between exposure to community violence and psychological distress was .27 (p < .01), with a medium effect size (Cohen, 1988). The correlation between these two variables in this sample is quite similar to that found in a previous sample from this population (Rosenthal & Wilson, 2001). The data, therefore, are consistent with the second assumption (that there is a relationship between exposure to community violence and later psychosocial adjustment).

The correlation between GPA and school persistence was .28 (p < .01); GPA accounted for only about 8% of the variance in persistence. GPA and persistence appear to represent quite distinct aspects of academic performance and should perhaps be considered separate variables when attempting to account for variance in academic performance. The correlations between exposure to chronic community violence during high school and both aspects of academic performance were not statistically significant: for GPA, the correlation with exposure to community violence was -.05 (p = .35); for persistence, it was -.06 (p = .28). Thus, the first hypothesis (that exposure to community violence is related to academic performance) was not confirmed by the data.

The correlation between psychological distress during the first semester and persistence into a third semester of college was -.13 (p < .01), with a small effect size (Cohen, 1988). Those students with high levels of psychological distress early in the first semester of college were less likely to persist into the third semester. The correlation between psychological distress and GPA was not statistically significant (r = -.09, p = .09). Thus, the data are mixed (as is the extant literature) with regard to the second hypothesis (that psychological distress is related to academic performance), and raise questions about the third assumption (that psychological distress impairs academic performance).

The results of these an*****s did not differ when females and males were analyzed separately.

DISCUSSION

The findings are consistent with the causal chain model, specifically that the effects of exposure to community violence in high school on academic performance in college are mediated by psychological distress. The direct correlation between exposure and academic performance was not significant, but there was a moderate correlation between exposure to community violence in high school and psychological distress at the beginning of college, and a small correlation between psychological distress at the beginning of college and persistence into the third semester of college. On the other hand, the estimated indirect impact of exposure to community violence in high school on persistence in college (through psychological distress) was quite small, and the indirect impact on GPA was essentially zero. Thus, the total impact of exposure to community violence on academic performance in the first year of college (direct impact plus indirect impact) appears to be rather trivial. These findings should provide some reassurance to those who are concerned about general long-term effects of exposure to community violence in high school.

From the perspective of attempting to understand persistence in college, the findings of this study are not quite so promising. The relationships between persistence and both GPA and psychological distress were statistically significant, but the effect sizes were small to medium (together, the two accounted for less than 10% of the variance in persistence). Lack of persistence in college among this population would seem to be not primarily either an academic or a mental health problem; the origins may lie in other arenas, such as economic circumstances or in a lack of valuing education (Rosenthal, 1998).

The lack of statistical significance for some of the relationships likely reflects the actual relationships within this sample and is not an artifact of the methodology. Lack of relationships can result from lack of reliability of measures or from truncated distributions on the variables or from using small samples (Pedhazur, 1997). But the reliabilities of the scales used in this study were all above .87, indicating very low levels of measurement error. The distributions on the variables of distress and GPA covered almost the entire possible range of scores for the instruments, and the distribution on exposure to community violence (i.e., standard deviation) was quite substantial; thus, the distributions were not truncated. The size of the sample (N = 385) provided substantial statistical power, detecting a relationship of r = .20 at the .05 level of significance 98% of the time (Cohen, 1988).

Nevertheless, the findings of the present study may be generalized only with caution. The sample was purposive rather than strictly representative; it was selected to maximize the relations being studied, and therefore focused on beginning first-year college students who had recently graduated from high schools in a large urban area and who tended to be members of minority ethnic and racial groups. On the other hand, the sample was large and quite diverse in terms of other demographic variables. This sample was similar, with regard to exposure to community violence and levels of psychological distress, to samples from three other public, urban, four-year colleges (Rosenthal, 2002).

The findings regarding the relationship between psychological distress and GPA are consistent with the few empirical studies reported in the literature. Perhaps the best interpretation of the findings of this study, with regard to the lack of substantial relationships among exposure to community violence in high school, level of psychological distress at the beginning of college, and academic performance during the first two years of college, is that they are a reasonable, tentative first approximation of these relationships.

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