School Shooting Factors: A Content Analysis of All 29 Rampage School Shootings

Background and Purpose: From 1974 to 2008 there were 29 middle or high school rampage shootings which had an immense impact on communities across the United States. Students began to fear being at school, and school social workers were faced with new challenges. While previous studies on school shootings examined media framing, prevention, and clinical considerations, only a small portion of the 29 cases have been used in research. Additionally, few studies focus on examining and comparing factors reported by the media and scholarly research. Since media often serve as the gatekeepers of information and are a crucial component in the construction of perceptions surrounding school shootings, the examination of potential discrepancies between media and scholarly interpretations of rampage shootings has important implications for understanding salient factors that inform responses to such events.

Methods: The Lexis-Nexis database was used to access media reports from five of the top ten newspapers and three of the top five news magazines (based on circulation). The journal articles were obtained using the EBSCO search engine with all databases being selected. Search terms used for the media reports included the names and locations of all 29 school shootings, with “school shooting” and “school massacre” being used for the journal articles. A stratified random sampling technique was used to ensure representation from all 29 school shootings. Media reports were selected until saturation (N=242), and 100 of the 248 journal articles were selected for inclusion.

The content analysis was completed by four coders that had a high inter-rater reliability (á=.842 after training, and á=.841 upon completion). A grounded approach produced nineteen categories which uncovered significant differences between print media and journal articles. Three distinct timeframes were evident in both the media reports and journal articles.

Results: The three distinct timeframes that were evident in the articles consisted of: the overlooked years (1974 through beginning of 1995), the focused years (end of 1995 through 1999), and the reflective years (2000 through 2008). Only one journal article and 17% of the media articles were published in the overlooked years; whereas the rest were concentrated in the focused and reflective years. Overall, the factors cited most by the media were significantly different than the factors discussed in the scholarly literature. That trend remained evident when the media reports were separated into the identified timeframes.

Conclusions and Implications: The rarity and extreme nature of rampage school shootings often leads to the media sensationalizing factors associated with their occurrences, and paying a disproportionately high amount of attention to them. For that reason it is crucial for social workers, social work educators, and policy makers to have a fundamental understanding of the events based on research instead of sensationalized reports. History has shown that without a foundation in research, policy makers and practitioners may make decisions that are reactive and biased towards misconceptions instead of proactive and based on research. The implications for those mistakes are hefty and could hinder the ability to prevent future school shootings.