Association between Maladaptive Conflict Managements Skills and Weapon Brandishment among Impoverished Adolescents

Background: With homicide continuing to rank as the second leading cause of death among youth, research must focus on diminishing weapon brandishment rates. Learning more about how adolescents handle conflicts may explain high weapon brandishment rates and guide prevention efforts.

Methods: The Mobile Youth Survey (MYS) is a community research project designed to determine decision making and subsequent health risk among impoverished adolescents. The responses of 2,335 adolescents that participated in the 2006 wave of the MYS were analyzed in order to identify if there is an association between poor conflict management skills, such as difficulty controlling anger and a tendency to solve conflicts with retaliation, and carrying guns, knives, and/or razors in the past three months.

Results: One-fifth of adolescents (n=488, 20.9%) reported carrying a knife or razor, and 388 (16.6%) reported carrying a gun in the past three months. Adolescents that reported fighting, yelling or getting crazy when angry, having a quick temper, not caring who gets hurt when they get mad, believing that hitting someone will knock sense into them, and believing that a person should stand their ground when in an argument were between 1.28 and 2.17 times more likely to report carrying a gun, knife and/or razor in the past three months, while adjusting for age and gender.

Conclusions: Adolescents that indicated maladaptive approaches to conflict were more likely carry a knife, razor or gun in the past three months. Intervention programs should consider teaching high risk adolescents adaptive methods of managing confrontation and anger.