Neighborhood Predictors of Dating Violence Victimization and Perpetration in Young Adulthood: A Multilevel Study

Objectives. We examined whether social processes of neighborhoods, such as collective efficacy, during individual''s adolescent years affect the likelihood of being involved in physical dating violence during young adulthood.Methods. Using longitudinal data on 633 urban youths aged 13 to 19 years at baseline and data from their neighborhoods (collected by the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods), we ran multilevel linear regression models separately by gender to assess the association between collective efficacy and physical dating violence victimization and perpetration, controlling for individual covariates, neighborhood poverty, and perceived neighborhood violence.Results. Females were significantly more likely than were males to be perpetrators of dating violence during young adulthood (38% vs 19%). Multilevel analyses revealed some variation in dating violence at the neighborhood level, partly accounted for by collective efficacy. Collective efficacy was predictive of victimization for males but not females after control for confounders; it was marginally associated with perpetration (P = .07). The effects of collective efficacy varied by neighborhood poverty. Finally, a significant proportion (intraclass correlation = 14%–21%) of the neighborhood-level variation in male perpetration remained unexplained after modeling.Conclusions. Community-level strategies may be useful in preventing dating violence.Intimate partner violence (IPV), a serious public health problem worldwide, often begins as adolescent dating violence.¹ In the United States, more than 25 million women and 7 million men have experienced partner violence during their lifetimes.² Young adults have the highest risk for IPV.³ Despite an expansion of studies on IPV in the past 2 decades, prior literature has mainly focused on identifying individual- and relationship-level predictors of violence against women.^4–7 Limited studies have considered the social context of youth within which dating violence is embedded.^8,9 Given that patterns of IPV typically emerge during adolescence and levels increase over time,^1,2 it is important to examine whether neighborhood resources can be leveraged to prevent dating violence during young adulthood.