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Abstract
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VioLit summary:
OBJECTIVE:
The purpose of this study by Goldstein was to explore new ideas for aggression reduction among juvenile offenders, through examining the Aggression Replacement Training Program (ART).
METHODOLOGY:
This study was a non-experimental review of the literature. Aggression was defined by the author as violence and vandalism by juveniles in schools, child and spouse abuse and other forms of domestic violence, assaults, muggings, homicides, rape, terrorism, athletic mayhem, clan blood feuds, ritual torture, police brutality or organized warfare.
The author sought to highlight what constituted an effective means for reducing aggression: complexity, presciptiveness, situationality, and the belief that aggression and its prosocial alternatives were learned behaviors. There has been a tendency in the United States to find one solution to major social problems. Instead of proposing a single program for reducing aggression, the author suggested a multi-faceted intervention.
FINDINGS/DISCUSSION:
Aggression Replacement Training (ART) was a recently developed and evaluated intervention approach designed for use with chronically aggressive juvenile delinquents. Its three learning-based components were selected or developed by the authors as a direct expression of a desire to construct a multimethod, multichannel, complex intervention. These components were designed to simultaneously decrease the likelihood of antisocial behavior and increase the likelihood of prosocial, alternative behaviors. The first component was Structured Learning, a systematic, psychoeducatonal intervention which demonstrated across a great many investigations to reliably serve the purpose of teaching a fifty-skill curriculum of prosocial behaviors. The second component, Anger Control Training taught youngsters what not to do in anger-instigating situations. The final component, Moral Education, would expose youngsters to a series of moral dilemmas in a discussion group context. Youngsters would then learn to reason and confront conflict at different cognitive levels of moral thinking.
The author believed that successful aggression reduction would be substantially more likely to occur in interventions which were applied in a differential, tailored, individualized, or prescriptive manner. Modern psychology has moved away from the exclusive use of personality indices and has increasingly relied on person plus situation interactional information to reach its understanding, prediction and control goals. Finally, the author suggested that in addition to thinking about aggression complexly, prescriptively, and situationally, a vital step in serious efforts to deal with aggressive behavior required that such behavior is viewed as learned.
AUTHOR'S RECOMMENDATIONS:
The author suggested that ART should only be viewed as a prescriptive first step. However, it was argued that ART may serve as a beginning to further research concerning intervention programs that would reduce aggressive behavior.
(CSPV Abstract - Copyright © 1992-2007 by the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence, Institute of Behavioral Science, Regents of the University of Colorado)
KW - Literature Review
KW - Juvenile Offender
KW - Juvenile Aggression
KW - Aggression Intervention
KW - Training Program
KW - Intervention Program
KW - Juvenile Crime
KW - Juvenile Delinquency
KW - Juvenile Violence
KW - Violence Intervention
KW - Crime Intervention
KW - Delinquency Intervention |