Research Report on The Effects of a Mentor Implementation Program on Violence Among Youths

This research is a combination of exploration and application. First, it is an exploration because there hasn’t been a lot of studies on how the effects of having interventions with the children at the emergency departments. Second, it is an application because the researchers are implementing a mentor for the children with schedule visits and help from a health educator to test if the findings of this research had an increase or decrease violence.

The main question in this research seeks to answer if the effects having a mentor implementation program will decrease violence among youths. This research is important because if it shows that having a mentor for children who are victims of abuse can reduce future violence and crimes. In addition, it will lead to more programs and future research to start this. This research builds upon previous research because the past research focused on older youths and adults, and the results were mixed. The point of this research was to target a younger group of youths to see if the interventions had better effects. Also, they made sure the test the kids at the emergency department where they were more vulnerable and to see if this had a greater impact on this.

The unit of analysis consisted of children from ages 10 to 15 years old and they’re parents. These children were selected based on their peer assaulted injuries. Also, the study was conducted at the emergency department of two large urban hospitals in Baltimore.

The main independent variable is the mentor implemented program. It is operationalized by only having a mentor in the intervention group. The mentors would meet with the children in the intervention group 6 times in the 2 to 6 months study, and the children and parents would receive 3 home visits with a health educator.

The units were assigned to the treatment/control group by randomization. This random study consisted of two groups: the intervention group, and the comparison group. In the intervention group, each child was assigned a mentor from the start till the end.

The dependent variable is measurement of violence. It was operationalized by asking questions to the children about how many times they got in a fight, fight injuries, weapon carryings, misdemeanor problem, friend behavior, and aggression. They were also asked about their attitudes about violence, retaliation, and self-efficacy. All the children from both groups were measured at baseline and the end of the study to test the results.

The main findings from this research were that the participants in the intervention group showed a significant decrease in violence and an increase in self-efficacy, compared to the comparison group.

I didn’t find any ethical issues throughout the research and there was no harm done to the participants. The participation was voluntary because it even said that of the 227 families recruited, 23% of them refused to participate. Finally, the data was kept confidential because there was no list of names of the participants throughout the research.

I thought this was a well performed research study. The findings in this study can be considered valid, but it only recruited data from two emergency departments in Baltimore area. If this study was conducted in other urban areas of this country with a bigger sample size, then I would say this data is more valid. The researchers did eliminate any biases since it was a random study.