Development of a Definition and Measure for the Study of Violent Mass Victimization

For decades there has been a growing body of literature and research on the topic of mass murder with no attention paid to incidents of mass violence whose death toll falls just short of the minimum three body requirement. The purpose of this study is to address this gap and develop a valid and reliable definitional measure for the future study of violent mass victimization events. A mixed methods approach was employed and consisted of assessing 1,118 news articles collected from 42 U.S. states for the years of 2009 through 2012. These articles were collapsed into a sample size of 550 cases for the initial measure testing phase. The articles were used to identify themes related to mass violent events and operationalized for statistical testing. Once the measure had been tested, 682 cases of mass violence were obtained from the National Incident Based Reporting System for the years of 2009 through 2012. These data were used to test the mass violent victimization measure. Bivariate, OLS, and logistic regressions were conducted in the testing of the measure. Results of the study showed the measure to be reliable and suitable for future research on incidents of mass violence