Comprehensive Longitudinal Study of School Violence and the School-to-Prison Pipeline: Root Causes and Consequences of and Implications for Restorative Justice Approaches, Oregon, 2004-2015

This study used a multi-systems approach to understand the root causes of school violence in the state of Oregon (United States), accounting for factors within the individual, family, school, juvenile justice, child protective services, and social services systems and how they work together in predicting school violence. The effort was guided by four Research Questions: What are the potential root causes and related factors that contribute to school violence? What are the disciplinary responses to school violence, and are rates of suspensions and expulsions equivalent across demographic subgroups of students? What is the sequence of events that lead from a school-related disciplinary incident to an arrest and to juvenile or adult court involvement and disposition, and which individual, family, school, and neighborhood factors influence this trajectory? What are the responses to and consequences of shootings in K-12 public settings? To answer these questions, RMC Research, with support from the the Oregon Youth Authority (OYA) and the Oregon Department of Education (ODE), conducted a secondary analysis of existing data on 15 cohorts of students between kindergarten and grade 12. Research Questions 1, 2, and 3 were addressed using a multi-level cohort design with longitudinal data provided by OYA (n=5,129,815 observations across time from 855,580 unique youth). Research Question 4 was addressed through an extensive review of research on school safety strategies. This collection contains 16 SPSS syntax files used to clean and analyze the secondary data, detailed guides to data preparation and data-related decisions made by the research team, and a list of obtained data files and variables. There are no data files in this collection.