Political Violence Exposure, Adolescent School Violence, and Drug Use: The Mediating Role of School Support and Posttraumatic Stress.

Political Violence Exposure, Adolescent School Violence, and Drug Use: The Mediating Role of School Support and Posttraumatic Stress. Am J Orthopsychiatry. 2016 Apr 21; Authors: Fang L, Schiff M, Benbenishty R Abstract Adolescents may engage in risk behaviors to cope with the negative psychological impacts resulting from exposure to political violence. Guided by the Deterioration Deterrence Model and General Strain Theory, the present study assessed the mediating role of school support and posttraumatic stress (PTS) on two adolescent risk behaviors (i.e., school violence and drug use) among Arab and Jewish Israeli adolescents. We analyzed data from a nationally representative survey that consisted of 4,733 Israeli high school students (54.5% females; 63.2% Jewish) following the Second Lebanon War. Structural equation modeling using weighted data bootstrapped with 2,000 iterations evaluated the mediated effects of school support and PTS. The results showed that both school support and PTS mediated the pathways from political violence exposure to school violence and drug use. However, although school support and PTS fully mediated the relationship between political violence exposure and these risk behaviors for Jewish students, school support and PTS only partially mediated the relationships for Arab students. While school support can help decrease the detrimental effect of exposure to terrorism and war, Israeli adolescents exposed to ...
Source: The American Journal of Orthopsychiatry - Category: Psychiatry Tags: Am J Orthopsychiatry Source Type: research