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Welcome
Violence is an urgent public health problem. From infants to the elderly, it affects people in all stages of life. The long-term effects of violence can threaten individuals, their families, communities, and society at large. The high incidence of violence reinforces the need for and importance of the work that you as violence prevention professionals are doing every single day. As someone working hard to prevent violence in your community, you want to be sure your efforts are successful. But how do you do that?
The Violence Indicator Interactive Guide and Database
The Violence Indicator Interactive Guide will help you explore indicators to assist you with your efforts to evaluate and track your progress toward reducing violence in your community.
Here, you will learn what indicators are, why they’re important, and what factors to consider when selecting specific indicators. Then, you will have the opportunity to search through a comprehensive database of publicly available data to identify possible indicators; after identifying possible indicators, you can use tools and resources presented in this guide to assess how well the indicators fit your program’s needs and goals.
If you already feel comfortable with why and how indicators are important to your work and are ready to dive right into the Violence Indicator Database. If, instead, you would like a bit more background on indicators and why they are important to your violence prevention efforts, keep reading!
How Violence Indicators Help Reduce Violence in Your Community
Indicators serve as critical tools to help health practitioners, policy makers, and others who are committed to preventing violence monitor the occurrence of violence and its associated risk and protective factors, plan prevention efforts and evaluate their progress towards preventing violence.
Practitioners and researchers can use the wide variety of indicators spanning the social-ecological model as short-term and intermediate outcomes to assess the impact of prevention efforts, as well as proxies for different types of violence. Measures of risk and protective factors may be particularly important for community and societal level prevention strategies that may not show immediate impacts on violence outcomes. Also, the data identified in this database can help practitioners identify target populations, select prevention strategies, develop an evaluation baseline, and for other decision-making.
Programs may benefit from tracking multiple indicators within a state or community to get a picture of what is happening in the broader context where a prevention strategy is being implemented. For example, a program aiming to increase community connectedness as a way to reduce violence may also choose to track changes in the physical environment and economic stress because these factors also may contribute to changes in violence outcomes within the community.
You may choose to watch or track changes related to risk factors, protective factors, or other relevant conditions for violence, all things that can be measured over time. Indicators can provide information on various factors that influence the context where a prevention strategy is implemented and provide valuable information about trends to better understand what changes may be happening in a county or state. However, as you select indicators, it is important to ensure you are selecting ones that are the best fit for your selected prevention strategies and outcomes.
Think of the Violence Indicator Interactive Guide as a roadmap to help you start to identify and select the best measures to evaluate your violence prevention initiatives.