CRE Research Instruments

A useful starting place for CRE researchers is the 258-page pdf manual entitled Evaluating Your Conflict Resolution Education Program: A Guide for Educators and Evaluators developed by Tricia Jones and Dan Kmitta for the Ohio Commission on Dispute Resolution and Conflict Management and the Ohio Department of Education. It is intended to help educators and/or evaluators conduct evaluations of their conflict resolution education programs. The manual was prepared as a workbook so that it should be easy to use. Worksheets are included throughout the beginning parts of the manual to help users identify the program goals and evaluation goals they want to emphasize. When offered, questionnaires and interview questions are presented so that the user can simply copy the forms from the book and use them in a school.

Another really valuable resource is the compendium Measuring Violence-Related Attitudes, Behaviors, and Influences Among Youths (2nd Ed). The 373-page compendium, available as a pdf, provides researchers and prevention specialists with a set of tools to assess violence-related beliefs, behaviors, and influences, as well as to evaluate programs to prevent youth violence. Although this compendium contains more than 170 measures, it does not claim to be an exhaustive listing of available measures.

Most of the measures in the compendium are intended for use with youths between the ages of 11 and 24 years, to assess such factors as serious violent and delinquent behavior, conflict resolution strategies, social and emotional competencies, peer influences, parental monitoring and supervision, family relationships, exposure to violence, collective efficacy, and neighborhood characteristics. The compendium also contains a number of scales and assessments developed for use with children between the ages of 5 and 10 years, to measure factors such as aggressive fantasies, beliefs supportive of aggression, attributive bias, pro-social behavior, and aggressive behavior. When parent and teacher versions of assessments are available, they are included as well.

For more general advice on what to consider when developing an evaluation of a school-based conflict resolution training program, this ERIC Digest by Morton Deutsch on Practitioner Assessment of Conflict Resolution Programs provides a quick overview.