Building community resilience to prevent and mitigate community impact of gun violence: Conceptual framework and intervention design

Emily A. Wang*, Carley Riley, George Wood, Ann Greene, Nadine Horton, Maurice Williams, Pina Violano, Rachel Michele Brase, Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein, Andrew V. Papachristos, Brita Roy

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

20 Scopus citations

Abstract

Introduction The USA has the highest rate of community gun violence of any developed democracy. There is an urgent need to develop feasible, scalable and community-led interventions that mitigate incident gun violence and its associated health impacts. Our community-academic research team received National Institutes of Health funding to design a community-led intervention that mitigates the health impacts of living in communities with high rates of gun violence. Methods and analysis We adapted 'Building Resilience to Disasters', a conceptual framework for natural disaster preparedness, to guide actions of multiple sectors and the broader community to respond to the man-made disaster of gun violence. Using this framework, we will identify existing community assets to be building blocks of future community-led interventions. To identify existing community assets, we will conduct social network and spatial analyses of the gun violence episodes in our community and use these analyses to identify people and neighbourhood blocks that have been successful in avoiding gun violence. We will conduct qualitative interviews among a sample of individuals in the network that have avoided violence (n=45) and those living or working on blocks that have not been a location of victimisation (n=45) to identify existing assets. Lastly, we will use community-based system dynamics modelling processes to create a computer simulation of the community-level contributors and mitigators of the effects of gun violence that incorporates local population-based based data for calibration. We will engage a multistakeholder group and use themes from the qualitative interviews and the computer simulation to identify feasible community-led interventions. Ethics and dissemination The Human Investigation Committee at Yale University School of Medicine (#2000022360) granted study approval. We will disseminate study findings through peer-reviewed publications and academic and community presentations. The qualitative interview guides, system dynamics model and group model building scripts will be shared broadly.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article numbere040277
JournalBMJ open
Volume10
Issue number10
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 10 2020

Funding

Twitter Emily A Wang @ewang422, Carley Riley @Carley_Riley and Brita Roy @ Broy3445 Acknowledgements We would like to acknowledge Barbara Tinney and Georgina Lucas, as well as Drs Anita Vashi and Nurit Harari for their early contributions to this conceptual framework. We would also like to acknowledge the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, who provided fellowship funding from which this work originated. Contributors EAW, CR, BR, AG, AVP and MW conceptualised the study design, and GW, NH, LB-R and PV contributed to the study design. EAW, RMB and BR drafted and led writing the manuscript, and all authors contributed to revising it for important intellectual content. All authors approved the final version of the manuscript. Funding The study described was supported by the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (1R01MD010403-01A1). personal fees from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and grant funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, outside the submitted work. BR also reports grant funding from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute outside the submitted work. EAW also reports funding from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, National Cancer Institute, National Institute on Drug Abuse, the California Health Care Foundation and the William T. Grant Foundation. The other authors declare no competing interests.

Keywords

  • accident & emergency medicine
  • epidemiology
  • public health
  • statistics & research methods
  • trauma management

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Medicine

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