# Prevalence of community gun violence exposure and consequences for adolescent well-being: identifying sources of heterogeneity to disrupt the cycle of violence

> **NIH ALLCDC R01** · UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT DAVIS · 2020 · $299,245

## Abstract

PROJECT ABSTRACT
Community violence, defined as intentional, interpersonal acts of violence committed in public places, is a
recognized form of trauma that disproportionately impacts youth of color. Past research has linked exposure to
community violence with a wide range of adverse outcomes that elevate risk for subsequent violence
involvement. But several gaps in the literature remain. First, few studies focus on exposure to community
violence involving guns. Second, there is a critical dearth of fine-grained data on gun violence at the small-area
level from other sources beyond self-reported survey items, which provide an incomplete picture of the broader
spectrum of gun violence experiences and exposure. Third, although it is commonly hypothesized that the
consequences of exposure to violence vary by individual, family, school, and neighborhood characteristics, past
research on this type of effect heterogeneity is rare, limiting our understanding of the risk and protective factors
that confer differential vulnerability or resilience to community gun violence exposure and the best ways to target
strategies for preventing subsequent gun violence-related harm. To address these gaps in knowledge, the
proposed project is designed to estimate the population prevalence and consequences of youths' exposure to
community gun violence, regardless of whether the violence was experienced firsthand, and to identify the
malleable risk and protective factors associated with variations therein. This work will use a unique combination
of longitudinal data on a national, probability-based sample of youth and their families, schools, and
neighborhoods from the 1998/2000 to 2014/17 waves of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study
(FFCWS) geospatially linked with highly resolved temporal and spatial information on deadly gun violence
incidents from the Gun Violence Archive (GVA). These data will allow for the first detailed, nationally
representative estimates of youths' exposure to community gun violence, as well as for a more definitive
assessment of the impacts of community gun violence exposure on a wide range of youths' social-emotional
health and behavioral outcomes that have been associated in past research with subsequent gun violence-
related harm. They will also allow for the implementation of propensity score matching methods to strengthen
causal inference by accounting for a comprehensive set of pre-exposure characteristics that predict youths'
likelihood of experiencing an incident of deadly gun violence in their local environment. All of these advances
will provide considerable traction on the final goal of identifying individual, familial, school, and neighborhood-
level factors associated with increased vulnerability or resilience to the adverse impacts of community gun
violence exposure on which the development and implementation of violence prevention strategies designed to
disrupt the cycle of violence can be based. This research addresse...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10163541
- **Project number:** 1R01CE003261-01
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT DAVIS
- **Principal Investigator:** Angela Bruns
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** ALLCDC
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $299,245
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2020-09-30 → 2022-09-29

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10163541

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10163541, Prevalence of community gun violence exposure and consequences for adolescent well-being: identifying sources of heterogeneity to disrupt the cycle of violence (1R01CE003261-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10163541. Licensed CC0.

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