School Size and Youth Violence: Potential Mediating and Moderating Role of School Connectedness

Youth violence continues to be considered a public health concern in the United States. Extant research indicates school size is positively associated with youth violence. School connectedness (i.e., the quality of perceived relationships between students and school personnel) has been found to be inversely associated with youth violence. This study utilized longitudinal data to test the possible mediating and moderating effects of school connectedness between school size and youth violence. The participants were obtained from Waves I and II of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), a nationally representative ongoing survey of 7th through 12th grade students in the United States. A series of multilevel models using Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM6) procedures were compared. Results did not support school connectedness as a moderator; however, results did support school connectedness as a mediator between school size and youth violence. Although no direct relationship was found between school size and youth violence, there was a significant inverse relationship between school size and school connectedness and a significant inverse relationship between school connectedness and youth violence. These findings highlight the importance of how the quality of individual student-school personnel relationships can play a role in preventing violence both within and outside of the school setting. Furthermore, increasing school student population appears to play a role in creating challenges in the development of quality relationships between students and school personnel, which in turn impedes prevention of youth violence. In addition to contributing to the literature on preventing youth violence, this study also underscores the need for future research to take caution in research design and measurement with Add Health data, and further exploration in alternative contextual relationships that may prevent youth violence.