University of Rochester, Department of Psychiatry, 300 Crittenden Blvd, Box PSYCH, Rochester, NY, 14642, USA.
University of Rochester, Department of Psychiatry, 300 Crittenden Blvd, Box PSYCH, Rochester, NY, 14642, USA; Children's Institute, 274 N. Goodman Street, Suite D103, Rochester, NY, 14607, USA.
Soc Sci Med. 2021 Mar;272:113469. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2020.113469. Epub 2020 Nov 7.
A complex system of factors interacting across time shapes community violence. It is not well understood how features of persons, institutions and communities interact as a "system" to produce escalating community violence. We aimed to integrate theoretical and experiential knowledge among young African-American urban males to develop a concept model of key causal structures driving dynamics of community violence escalation over time in a context of historical racism.
We analyzed three published sources (two documentary films and one ethnography) containing lived experience perspectives on community violence escalation among African American males in three U.S. cities experiencing civil unrest due to structural racism. Qualitative descriptive analysis identified features in three key thematic categories: racialized policies and practices, economic and social disenfranchisement, and intrapsychic factors. We used causal loop diagramming, a system dynamics method designed for depicting dynamic hypotheses about the system structure producing observed trends over time, to represent the dynamic relationships among identified individual and community variables.
The concept model contained key feedback structures capable of generating exponential growth in violence - providing detailed dynamic hypotheses about how violence can beget more violence ("violence escalation") within a community. Referred to as reinforcing feedback loops, these dynamics involved development of kill-or-be-killed norms, civil unrest emerging from racially oppressive policies, internalizing the code of the streets to seek outward displays of power, and processes that get one "stuck" or not able to break out of the system of violence.
Qualitative system dynamics methods offered an approach to uncover and hypothesize the complex, dynamic relationships between variables shaping violence escalation trends. The resulting causal loop diagram hypothesized dynamic mechanisms capable of creating and perpetuating racial disparities in community violence escalation, that can be tested in future research to inform action to break observed cycles of community violence.
一个由多种因素相互作用构成的复杂系统会对社区暴力产生影响。目前人们还不太了解个体、机构和社区的特征如何作为一个“系统”相互作用，从而导致社区暴力不断升级。我们的目的是整合年轻非裔美国男性的理论和经验知识，以便在历史种族主义背景下，构建一个能够说明导致社区暴力随时间不断升级的关键因果结构的概念模型。
我们分析了三个来源（两部纪录片和一部民族志），这些来源包含了在三个美国城市中，由于结构性种族主义而经历了公民动乱的非裔美国男性对社区暴力升级的生活体验观点。定性描述性分析确定了三个关键主题类别的特征：种族主义政策和做法、经济和社会被剥夺权利以及内在心理因素。我们使用因果回路图，这是一种用于描述关于产生随时间观察到的趋势的系统结构的动态假设的系统动力学方法，来表示所确定的个体和社区变量之间的动态关系。
该概念模型包含了能够产生暴力指数级增长的关键反馈结构——提供了关于社区内暴力如何导致更多暴力（“暴力升级”）的详细动态假设。这些动态涉及到“杀或被杀”规范的发展、种族压迫政策引发的公民动乱、内化街头规则以寻求外部权力展示以及使一个人“陷入”或无法摆脱暴力系统的过程。
定性系统动力学方法提供了一种方法，可以揭示和假设塑造暴力升级趋势的变量之间复杂的、动态的关系。由此产生的因果回路图假设了能够创造和延续社区暴力升级中种族差异的动态机制，可以在未来的研究中进行测试，为打破观察到的社区暴力循环提供信息。
