The youth violence potential scale for practitioners

Abstract

Youth are central to issues of interpersonal violence. South Africa has among the highest rates of intentional homicide globally, with many youth being victims and perpetrators. Given their vulnerability, there is a critical need for practitioner-friendly measurement tools to assess both the propensity for violent behaviours and changes in such propensity over time. This policy brief concerns adapting the existing Youth Violence Potential Scale1 to a practitioner version (the YVPS-P) for youth development programmers who are unfamiliar with quantitative research in order to score youth violence risk.