A Meta-Analysis of Longitudinal Partial Correlations Between School Violence and Mental Health, School Performance, and Criminal or Delinquent Acts.

The daily challenges resulting from all types of school violence—such as physical aggression, bullying, peer victimization, and general threats—have the potential to affect, longitudinally, students' mental health, school performance, and involvement in criminal or delinquent acts. Across primary and secondary studies, however, variation in how and how much school violence relates to these outcomes, has persisted. The purpose of this systematic review and meta-analysis, therefore, was to clarify this uncertainty by synthesizing the longitudinal relations. We conducted exhaustive searching procedures, implemented rigorous screening and coding processes, and estimated an underused effect size, the partial correlation from multiple regression models, before estimating a random-effects meta-analysis using robust variance estimation. We meta-analyzed 114 independent studies, totaling 765 effect sizes across 95,618 individual participants. The results of the overall analyses found a statistically significant longitudinal relation between school violence, in any role, and the aggregated outcome variables (rp =.06). Given that this effect size inherently controls for multiple potential confounding covariates, we consider the relation's magnitude clinically meaningful. We end by discussing ways practitioners and researchers may use these analyses when implementing prevention programming and how the field of meta-analysis should more frequently utilize the partial correlation. Public Significance Statement: This systematic review and meta-analysis finds that perpetration of school violence is strongly associated with numerous mental health outcomes, academic performance indicators, and involvement in criminal or delinquent behaviors, whereas victimization was largely associated with only mental health outcomes. Any experience of school violence should be addressed as a marker of potential compromised mental health. In addition, students who target others may benefit from a general needs assessment to avoid future delinquency and academic disengagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]