Measures of Potentially Mutual Violence for Evaluating Conflict Resolution or Restorative Justice Programs

While founded in principles of nonviolence, conflict resolution and restorative justice interventions are rarely evaluated against an outcome of self-reported violence and often use criminal legal system-determined metrics, such as recidivism, or occasionally, broad neighborhood crime rates. In the absence of widely used and tested relational measures of community violence, a measures review was conducted using library databases, search engines, and compendia of measures to identify tools to adapt for this purpose. The 69 measures of self-reported violence reviewed were analyzed in detail, with results cataloged and charted. Key criteria included: self-report, applicability to various age ranges, measurement of violence between two or more specific people, documentation of both victimization and offending, inclusion of violence with a weapon, and applicability to non-intimates. Four measures met these criteria, and two measures exhibited the best potential for adaptability to further exploration and application to understanding mutual violence in community settings. The review suggests that adapting intimate partner violence measures, such as the Revised Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS2) (in long and short form), is a promising strategy for those evaluating the ability of conflict resolution or restorative justice interventions to reduce violence in multiple settings. Adaptation of the Interpersonal Conflict and Resolution (iCOR) Partner Instrument to this research area may be the most desirable strategy. In addition to evaluating conflict resolution, violence interruption and prevention, restorative and transformative justice, and peacemaking strategies, future research applying CTS2 and iCOR to non-intimate community samples could be a useful addition to the broader literature on violence measurement.