Community Violence Exposure and Mental Health Symptom Networks

Community violence, defined as the experience of witnessing or being a victim of acts such as assaults, shootings, and robberies, as well as hearing gunfire in one’s community, outside of the home, is an epidemic in the United States (DeCou & Lynch, 2017; Fowler et al., 2009; Selner-O’Hagan et al., 1998). Although a robust body of research has documented associations between community violence exposure and adverse mental health outcomes, meta-analyses often report small to moderate effect sizes (Fowler et al., 2009). The modest effect sizes are surprising given that community violence exposure is often a frequent, chronic, and threatening condition, especially among those living in disadvantaged neighborhoods (Stein et al., 2003). One explanation for the modest effects may be the predominant reliance on aggregated scores that collapse across distinct types of exposure and broad symptom composites, obscuring heterogeneity in how the frequency of specific violence experiences (e.g., being threatened with a gun vs. witnessing a robbery) relate to the severity of specific mental health symptoms (aggression, suspicious of others, nightmares). Aggregation approaches may limit our ability to identify precise pathways through which community violence is associated with mental health. Thus, this study leverages the Longitudinal Studies of Child Abuse and Neglect (LONGSCAN) study, a multisite prospective study of children and families at high risk for violence exposure, to examine how the frequency of distinct community violence exposure experiences uniquely relates to individual mental health symptoms in adolescence. Ultimately, we seek to explore the structure of relationships between community violence exposure and mental health symptoms at a more granular level.