Relative Risk in Context: Exposure to Family and Neighborhood Violence within Schools

This paper evaluates the extent to which four different measures of exposure to risky neighborhood and family environments are associated with individual levels of victimization and attitudes supporting the use of aggression among a large and representative sample of Colombian children and adolescents in 5th and 9th grades (about 49,000 participants nested in 1,648 schools and 295 towns) who were evaluated in 2005. With the aid of random intercept models and adaptive centering, we conceptualize and describe the exposure to neighborhood and family violence reported by each participant as a function of their relative position within and between schools and towns. Results indicate unique and distinct effects of school and town composition on individual outcomes. We present our results as a basic descriptive portrait of the contextual experiences of Colombian students, and discuss how they may be used to identify ecological levels where interventions may be most likely to succeed.