| The research project focused on assessing the effectiveness of a violence reduction program called the Balance Program. The theoretical foundations of the program are based on the developmental tasks of Ingersoll (2003). The research was carried out in a California continuation high school where 90% of the student body were minority adolescents. All of the students had been referred to this continuation high school because of aggression problems that the school district felt could not be handled in a more traditional school setting.; The research design utilized in this study was a pretest-posttest control group design consisting of a control and treatment group composed of 10 participants in each group. The length of time of the intervention was five weeks. The treatment group met three times a week for approximately one hour per session. The pretest and posttest measures given to both the control and treatment groups were the Children's Inventory of Anger and the Student Academic, Attendance, Behavior Inventory.; The main findings revealed that there were no significant differences between the control and treatment groups on the following dependent variables of aggression: authority relations, frustration, physical aggression, peer relationship, argues with teachers, intense anger with discipline, refuses teacher's directives, speaks out of turn in class, wears gang colors openly, wears gang colors hidden, has cell phone taken away, caught smoking at school, angry outbursts with other students, angry outbursts with teacher, physical fights with other students, bullies other students, and inappropriate sexual behavior. Although there were no overall significant differences between the two groups in aggressive behavior, treatment group participants scored significantly higher than the control group participants on the associated non aggressive behavior of attending Anytime School. |
