10.1177/1541204003262224ARTICLEYouth Violence and Juvenile JusticeVazsony et al. / EVALUATION OF A VIOLENCE PREVENTION PROGRAM EVALUATION OF A SCHOOL-BASED, UNIVERSAL VIOLENCE PREVENTION PROGRAM:

The current investigation examined the differential effectiveness of PeaceBuilders, a large-scale, universal violence prevention program, on male and female youth identi-fied as low, medium, or high risk for future violence. It included eight urban schools ran-domly assigned to intensive intervention and wait-list control conditions. The current sample included N = 2,380 predominantly minority children in kindergarten through fifth grade. Results indicated differential effectiveness of the intervention, by level of risk; high-risk children reported more decreases in aggression and more increases in social competence in comparison to children at medium and low levels of risk. Findings add to a growing number of promising science-based prevention efforts that seek to reduce aggression and increase social competence; they provide encouraging evidence that relatively low-cost, schoolwide efforts have the potential to save society millions in victim, adjudication, and incarceration costs