National Institute of Justice publishes profile of Clark-Hill teen dating violence research

August 28, 2017

The National Institute of Justice has published a profile of a grant Elizabeth Goncy, Ph.D., former postdoc at the Clark-Hill Institute for Positive Youth Development, received while she was at VCU. Terri Sullivan, Ph.D., and Al Farrell, Ph.D., were Goncy's mentors on the grant and she used the data from Farrell's CDC-funded project to conduct the study. Goncy is currently starting her second year as an assistant professor at Cleveland State University.

Excerpt:

Recent research has documented the emergence of dating violence behaviors among middle-school-aged youth. Given that dating violence among this age group has received relatively little attention in the literature, researchers Elizabeth A. Goncy, Albert D. Farrell, and Terri N. Sullivan at Virginia Commonwealth University led a project funded by NIJ in order to better understand dating violence for early identification and development of targeted prevention and intervention strategies.

Among an ethnically diverse group of middle school students in a mid-sized southern city, about 40 percent of respondents endorsed at least one act of psychological or physical dating violence perpetration, and almost 50 percent reported experiencing one act of psychological or physical dating violence victimization in the past three months.

Read the full NIJ profile.