Abstract: The Mediation Role of School Support in the Relationship Between Political Trauma Exposure and Adolescent Risk Behaviors (Society for Social Work and Research 20th Annual Conference - Grand Challenges for Social Work: Setting a Research Agenda for the Future)

Schedule:

Sunday, January 17, 2016: 9:45 AM

Meeting Room Level-Meeting Room 13 (Renaissance Washington, DC Downtown Hotel)

* noted as presenting author

Lin Fang, PhD, Associate Professor, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

Miriam Schiff, PhD, Senior Lecturer, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

Rami Benbenishty, PhD, Professor, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel

Purpose:

School support is a powerful social capital for adolescents. For adolescents who live in war-inflicted regions, they may respond to political violence they experienced with high levels of risk behaviors (Miriam & Fang, 2014). School support may substantially negate the negative effects of exposure to war-related trauma. Focusing on Arab and Jewish adolescents in Israel, we aim to understand whether school support can mediate the relationship between exposure to political trauma and risk behaviors. We hypothesize that exposure to political trauma is associated with a greater level of school support, and strong school support is linked to decreased adolescent risk behaviors. We also hypothesize that school support can fully mediate the pathway from trauma exposure to risk behaviors. That is, with the presence of school support, the relationship between trauma exposure and risk behaviors would no longer be significant.

Methods:

We analyze data from a nationally representative survey that consists of 4733 Israeli high school students attending grades 10 and 11 following the Second Lebanon War. Stratified sampling strategy is used and data are weighted. We use SEM to simultaneously assess: 1) the direct relationships between political trauma exposure and adolescent risk behaviors (i.e. school violence and drug use), and 2) the indirect relationship mediated by school support among Arab students (Model 1; n = 1741) and Jewish students (Model 2; n= 2992). Weighted data are analyzed using ML command in Mplus 7, and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) are bootstrapped with 2000 iterations to evaluate the significance of the mediated effects by school support (MacKinnon, 2008). All analyses are adjusted for gender, age, and prior negative life events.

Results:

Study data fit both SEM models well (RMSEA = 0.04-0.05, CFI = 0.98-0.99, SRMR = 0.03). Contrary to our hypothesis, greater exposure to political violence is negatively associated with school support among Arab and Jewish students (B = -0.25, p<.0001; B = -0.14, p<.01, respectively). Less school support is then related to greater school violence (B = -0.46, p<.0001; B = -0.53, p<.0001; Arab and Jewish students, respectively) and higher drug use (B = -0.28, p<.0001; B = -0.38, p<.0001). Mediation analyses show that school support fully mediates the relationship between trauma exposure and risk behaviors for Jewish students (trauma exposure → school support → school violence: 95% CI, 0.01, 0.11, p<.01; trauma exposure → school support → drug use: 95% CI, 0.01, 0.09, p<.01). However, school support only partially mediates the relationships for Arab students (trauma exposure → school support → school violence: 95% CI, 0.04, 0.19, p<.01; trauma exposure → school support → drug use: 95% CI, 0.02, 0.11, p<.01), as trauma exposure still significantly correlates with the two risk behaviors (p’s<.05).

Implications:

School support can help mediate the detrimental effect of exposure to war-related terror for adolescents. However, Israeli students exposed to such traumatic events may find school support is weak and insufficient when they need it. Preventive programs should focus on preparing schools to provide additional support in times of external political violence.