Attitudes Toward Guns and Violence scale

Abstract

The Attitudes Toward Guns and Violence scale (also operationalized in psychometric literature as the Attitudes Toward Guns and Violence Questionnaire, or ATGVQ) is a standardized, multidimensional self-report assessment instrument designed to measure psychological cognitive orientations, affective affinities, and normative beliefs regarding firearms and violent interpersonal conduct among children and adolescents. Originally conceptualized and validated by clinical psychologist Jeremy P. Shapiro and colleagues in the late 1990s, the instrument addresses a critical gap in developmental psychopathology, school safety evaluation, and juvenile forensic assessment. The instrument comprises 23 items specifically calibrated for youths across primary and secondary educational levels (grades 3 through 12, approximately ages 8 to 18). Respondents rate their level of endorsement using a developmentally sensitive three-point categorical format: Agree, Not sure, and Disagree.

Through rigorous exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory structural modeling, the instrument has been established to reflect four distinct, theoretically grounded latent dimensions: (1) Aggressive Response to Shame, which quantifies the belief that retaliatory interpersonal violence is an imperative cognitive and behavioral mechanism for neutralizing perceived humiliation, disrespect, or narcissistic injury; (2) Excitement, capturing the sensation-seeking attraction, visceral thrill, and recreational fascination elicited by handling or carrying firearms; (3) Comfort with Aggression, evaluating an individual’s normative acceptance, moral tolerance, and desensitization toward aggressive acts; and (4) Power/Safety, which indexes compensatory instrumental beliefs that firearms and defensive group affiliations (such as street gangs) confer physical protection, invulnerability, and social dominance within hostile social environments.

Extensive psychometric investigations have established robust internal consistency reliability across the composite scale (Cronbach’s $\alpha$ consistently ranging between .85 and .92 across diverse normative and clinical samples) and acceptable-to-strong coefficients for its constituent subscales (ranging from .70 to .86). The scale demonstrates pronounced convergent and criterion-related validity, demonstrating significant correlations with teacher- and peer-reported behavioral aggression, disciplinary school suspensions, prior weapons-carrying history, and self-reported delinquency. By illuminating the cognitive distortions and affective drivers of youth weapon-carrying, the scale functions as an indispensable clinical, forensic, and epidemiological screening instrument for targeted violence prevention and intervention monitoring.

Keywords

Attitudes Toward Guns and Violence scale, ATGVQ, youth violence assessment, firearm attitudes, juvenile aggression, Aggressive Response to Shame, adolescent risk assessment, school violence prevention, moral disengagement, psychometrics

Authors

The Attitudes Toward Guns and Violence Questionnaire was developed through a coordinated collaborative research program led by Jeremy P. Shapiro, Ph.D., an accomplished clinical psychologist recognized for his work in child and adolescent clinical assessment, developmental psychopathology, and violence prevention. At the time of the instrument’s initial validation and manualization, Dr. Shapiro was affiliated with The Guidance Center (Cleveland, Ohio) and subsequently maintained faculty and clinical affiliations with Case Western Reserve University.

Key collaborators and co-investigators who contributed to the psychometric validation, scale construction, and developmental field testing include:

• Robert L. Dorman, Ph.D. — The Guidance Center and affiliated clinical psychology research programs, Cleveland, Ohio.
• Chris J. Welker, M.A. — Co-investigator on youth violence intervention metrics, weapon carriage surveillance, and public school sampling initiatives.
• Jeffrey B. Clough, B.A. — Research associate contributing to primary field data collection, psychometric scoring calibration, and factor analytic data verification.
• William M. Burkey, Ph.D. — Clinical and statistical consultant specializing in pediatric psychological assessment and structural equation modeling.

The standardized testing materials, administrative manual, and scoring protocols were formally published and distributed by Western Psychological Services (WPS), an established publisher of clinical and educational assessments headquartered in Los Angeles, California.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Attitudes Toward Guns and Violence scale is to provide a reliable, developmentally sensitive, and structurally validated diagnostic and research metric for identifying cognitive, emotional, and social-cognitive vulnerabilities linked to weapon carriage, gun violence, and retaliatory aggression in school-aged children and adolescents (grades 3–12). Firearm-related injuries and fatalities represent one of the leading causes of mortality among youth globally, particularly within urban environments characterized by community violence and socioeconomic adversity. Historically, many risk assessment instruments focused almost exclusively on overt behavioral indices (e.g., disciplinary citations, history of arrests, past physical altercations) or broad psychiatric symptomatology (e.g., conduct disorder, oppositional defiant disorder) without systematically evaluating the specific cognitive belief structures and affective appraisals that motivate a minor to acquire, carry, or discharge a firearm.

The theoretical rationale underlying the instrument rests upon the cognitive-behavioral premise that overt aggressive behaviors are mediated by deeply entrenched social-cognitive schemas. Minors do not typically engage in lethal or near-lethal weapon violence purely out of spontaneous impulse; rather, these acts are frequently catalyzed by established cognitive expectations regarding the instrumental utility of violence, perceived social norms regarding masculine honor and retaliation, and the compensatory need to alleviate feelings of powerlessness or humiliation. By systematically capturing these specific internal states, the instrument enables mental health professionals, criminologists, and educators to identify at-risk youth long before behavioral enactments culminate in catastrophic legal or physical outcomes.

In clinical, educational, and juvenile forensic contexts, the instrument serves several pivotal purposes:

• Universal and Targeted Screening: Public schools, community mental health agencies, and residential treatment facilities utilize the scale to gauge baseline attitudes across student cohorts, identifying individuals displaying extreme elevations in firearm affinity or normative aggression who may benefit from Tier 2 or Tier 3 interventions.
• Threat Assessment and Forensic Evaluations: When a student makes a direct or indirect threat of lethal school violence, forensic child psychologists employ the scale alongside multi-informant tools to evaluate the depth of the minor’s fascination with weapons, compensatory power-seeking needs, and rationalizations for retaliatory violence.
• Intervention Planning and Progress Monitoring: Evidence-based interventions such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), anger management protocols, and restorative justice curricula often target cognitive restructuring. Administering the scale pre- and post-intervention provides objective, psychometrically sound documentation of shifts in attitudes toward weapons and interpersonal conflict resolution.
• Epidemiological and Evaluation Research: Public health researchers utilize the scale to evaluate the efficacy of community-wide violence prevention programs, media literacy campaigns, and legislative or community policing initiatives designed to alter adolescent perceptions of gun culture.

Psychological Construct

The Attitudes Toward Guns and Violence scale is grounded in a multidimensional conceptualization of youth violence. Rather than treating aggression or firearm attraction as a unitary, unidimensional phenomenon, the scale operationalizes the psychological construct into four primary, intercorrelated latent factors. Each dimension taps into distinct psychological, developmental, and social-ecological mechanisms:

1. Aggressive Response to Shame (8 Items)

This subscale assesses an individual’s cognitive predisposition to experience acute social slights, perceived disrespect, or public teasing as intolerable forms of shame and narcissistic humiliation that can only be psychological resolved, cleansed, or neutralized through physical violence. Grounded in clinical observations of violent offenders, this dimension reflects an ego-syntonic imperative to defend personal or familial “reputation” and “pride” through retaliation. Youths scoring high on this dimension view nonviolent responses to insults as unacceptable demonstrations of weakness, cowardice, or victimhood.

Representative cognitive endorsements include the belief that failing to fight back after being insulted damages one’s identity irreparably (e.g., Item 2: “If someone disrespects me, I have to fight them to get my pride back”; Item 16: “If somebody insults you, and you don’t want to be a chump, you have to fight”). This construct aligns closely with psychological theories of hostile attributional bias and hypersensitivity to social exclusion, wherein interpersonal boundaries are maintained through aggressive hyper-vigilance.

2. Excitement (5 Items)

The Excitement subscale isolates an affective-appetitive construct: the visceral sensation seeking, intrinsic thrill, and hedonic fascination elicited by firearms. In contrast to purely instrumental views of weapons (e.g., possessing a gun solely for survival), this factor identifies a deep emotional attraction and play-oriented fascination with lethal weaponry. It captures the psychological phenomenon wherein guns are perceived not merely as tools, but as exciting toys or cultural artifacts that confer instantaneous social prestige and internal stimulation.

Youth who score high on this factor endorse items indicating that handling a loaded firearm is thrilling rather than alarming (e.g., Item 7: “It would be exciting to hold a loaded gun in my hand”; Item 14: “I think it would be fun to play around with a real gun”; Item 9: “I bet it would feel real cool to walk down the street with a gun in my pocket”). This construct is particularly predictive of accidental shootings, weapon showmanship, and voluntary participation in weapon-carrying subcultures driven by adolescent thrill seeking and impulsivity.

3. Comfort with Aggression (6 Items)

This dimension measures generalized moral acceptance, affective comfort, and normative tolerance regarding physical violence and weapons exposure. Unlike the reactive focus of the Shame factor, Comfort with Aggression captures an overarching cognitive climate of desensitization and moral disengagement. Individuals with elevated scores on this factor view aggression as a standard, legitimate, and acceptable modality for navigating life, expressing little to no distress, aversion, or ethical hesitation regarding violent encounters or weapon proliferation.

To capture this construct accurately and minimize response bias, this subscale heavily features reverse-scored items that reflect pro-social aversion to violence, empathy for potential victims, and the desire for weapon-free environments (e.g., Item 8: “I wish there weren’t any guns in my neighborhood”; Item 17: “I don’t like people who have guns because they might kill someone”; Item 21: “I wish everyone would get rid of all their guns”). Disagreement with these protective, peace-oriented statements signals an abnormal affective comfort with interpersonal violence and a lack of empathy for violence-related harm.

4. Power/Safety (4 Items)

The Power/Safety subscale measures the functional, instrumental belief that possessing a firearm or affiliating with violent collectives (such as street gangs) is a necessary and highly effective strategy for securing personal safety, invulnerability, and social empowerment. This construct emerges prominently among youth residing in environments characterized by pervasive community violence, ineffective law enforcement protection, and systemic trauma. In such contexts, weapons and gang memberships are perceived not necessarily out of malicious intent, but as essential defensive armor against victimization.

High scores indicate a strong cognitive linkage between carrying a weapon and psychological feelings of mastery, autonomy, and security (e.g., Item 3: “Carrying a gun makes people feel safe”; Item 4: “Carrying a gun makes people feel powerful and strong”; Item 19: “Belonging to a gang makes kids feel safe because they’ve got people to back them up”). This dimension highlights the paradoxical nature of youth weapon involvement: weapons are adopted to assuage chronic fear and vulnerability, yet their acquisition markedly elevates the actual statistical risk of violent death or severe injury.

Theoretical Framework

The structural composition and psychological rationale of the Attitudes Toward Guns and Violence scale are supported by four major psychological, criminological, and developmental theories:

1. Social Information Processing (SIP) Theory

Pioneered by Kenneth A. Dodge and Nicki R. Crick, Social Information Processing Theory outlines a multi-step cognitive framework through which children interpret social cues, generate behavioral responses, and enact social decisions. According to SIP theory, aggressive youth frequently exhibit systematic biases at each step of processing: encoding hostile cues selectively, attributing malicious intent to ambiguous peer actions (hostile attribution bias), clarifying goals that prioritize dominance over relationship preservation, and accessing aggressive behavioral responses from their cognitive repertoires while evaluating aggressive actions as morally acceptable and efficacious.

The instrument directly operationalizes multiple steps of this model. The Aggressive Response to Shame subscale reflects biased goal clarification and intent attribution, where social slights are classified as catastrophic challenges to honor that mandate aggressive counterattacks. Concurrently, the Power/Safety subscale assesses response outcome expectancies—specifically, the cognitive expectation that weapon carriage and gang affiliation will successfully yield positive instrumental outcomes (safety and deterrence) rather than severe negative ramifications.

2. Bandura’s Social Learning Theory and Moral Disengagement

Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory posits that aggressive behaviors and social attitudes are acquired through vicarious observation, behavioral modeling, and reinforcement within one’s immediate environment (family, peers, community, media). In communities or peer systems where firearm possession is celebrated or modeled as an emblem of adult status, youths readily incorporate these observations into their personal behavioral schemas.

Furthermore, Bandura’s conceptualization of moral disengagement explains how individuals suspend self-regulatory moral sanctions against perpetrating violence. Through mechanisms such as euphemistic labeling, advantageous comparison, displacement of responsibility, and dehumanization of victims, individuals overcome the innate psychological aversion to inflicting harm. The Comfort with Aggression subscale directly indexes the degree to which a youth has morally disengaged, failing to endorse standard empathetic concerns regarding the lethality and human suffering associated with firearm violence.

3. Gilligan’s Theory of Shame and Violent Retaliation

Forensic psychiatrist James Gilligan, drawing from decades of clinical interviews with violent offenders in correctional institutions, postulated that all intentional human violence is an attempt to ward off, neutralize, or wipe away feelings of unbearable shame, humiliation, disrespect, and ridicule. Gilligan asserted that when individuals lack pro-social sources of self-esteem or nonviolent conflict resolution strategies, an emotional experience of disrespect (being “dissed”) acts as a profound psychological wound. In this theoretical model, physical violence—and specifically weapon use—serves as an ego-defensive act aimed at replacing overwhelming shame with a sense of pride, power, and respect.

This dynamic forms the foundational bedrock of the Aggressive Response to Shame subscale. Shapiro and colleagues incorporated this insight directly into the instrument to evaluate whether a child or adolescent views shame as a lethal threat to the self that necessitates an externalized, violent counter-response to salvage social standing.

4. Berkowitz’s Weapons Effect and Cognitive Neoassociationism

Leonard Berkowitz’s Weapons Effect and Cognitive Neoassociation Theory suggest that the mere visual presence of a weapon can serve as a prime that activates aggressive cognitive networks, facilitating aggressive motor scripts and lowering the threshold for retaliatory action. When weapons are cognitively linked to feelings of excitement, coolness, and intrinsic gratification (as evaluated in the Excitement subscale), the presence or mental imagery of a firearm automatically primes positive affective reinforcement rather than inhibitory fear or moral constraint, thereby drastically accelerating the escalation toward physical violence.

Validity

The psychometric integrity of the Attitudes Toward Guns and Violence scale has been substantiated across diverse empirical investigations involving elementary, middle, and high school students, as well as juvenile justice populations and clinical cohorts referred for disruptive behavior disorders.

Construct Validity

Construct validity was initially established by Shapiro, Dorman, Burkey, Welker, and Clough (1997) during the scale’s derivation and validation phases across urban and suburban youth samples ($N > 800$). Structural analysis supported the distinctiveness of the four hypothesized factors, demonstrating that youth cognitive appraisals of violence are multidimensional rather than monolithic. Construct validity is further underscored by known-group comparisons: male adolescents consistently score significantly higher than female adolescents across all subscales—particularly on Excitement and Power/Safety—mirroring epidemiological gender disparities in firearm violence, weapon carriage, and violent crime perpetration.

Convergent Validity

Convergent validity has been robustly demonstrated through significant, positive correlations between the scale’s scores and collateral measures of behavioral aggression, delinquency, and antisocial attitudes. When administered alongside the Aggressive Behavior Checklist (ABC)—a companion behavioral assessment tool comprising teacher-report and student-report forms—the scale demonstrated statistically significant convergent correlations ($r = .42$ to $.56, p < .001$) with observable overt aggression, disruptive classroom behavior, and peer intimidation. Furthermore, studies examining youths with prior institutional disciplinary referrals demonstrated that individuals with elevated Aggressive Response to Shame and Comfort with Aggression scores exhibited significantly higher rates of physical fighting and self-reported weapon-carrying in school environments ($r = .48, p < .001$).

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity has been demonstrated by showing that the scale does not merely index general intelligence, academic underachievement, or generalized internalizing distress (such as depressive withdrawal or somatic anxiety). Correlations between the scale’s subscales and standardized academic achievement test scores or cognitive ability metrics are typically negligible to weak ($r = -.08$ to $-.14$, non-significant), demonstrating that the scale measures specific social-cognitive and affective orientations rather than intellectual deficits. Additionally, the scale differentiates successfully between aggressive conduct problems and non-aggressive emotional difficulties such as generalized anxiety, confirming that elevated scores reflect externalizing violence liability rather than broad emotional turmoil.

Criterion and Predictive Validity

Prospective and cross-sectional criterion studies (e.g., Shapiro, Dorman, Welker, & Clough, 1998) have revealed that the scale possesses strong predictive utility regarding real-world violence exposure and participation. Adolescents with elevated scores on the full scale and the Power/Safety subscale were substantially more likely to report having handled a firearm without adult supervision, having carried a concealed weapon outside the home, and having witnessed community firearm incidents. In longitudinal school tracking programs, baseline elevations on the Aggressive Response to Shame subscale prospectively predicted subsequent disciplinary suspensions for violent infractions over a 12-month follow-up period, demonstrating genuine predictive validity for educational risk management.

Reliability

The Attitudes Toward Guns and Violence scale exhibits high internal consistency reliability and temporal stability across a wide developmental span (grades 3 through 12).

Internal Consistency Reliability

In the primary standardization and validation studies conducted by Shapiro and colleagues (1997, 1998, 2000), internal consistency coefficients (Cronbach’s alpha) were computed across normative public school samples ($N > 1,000$) and specialized clinical cohorts:

• Total ATGVQ Scale (23 items): Cronbach’s $\alpha$ consistently ranges from .85 to .92, indicating exemplary overall internal consistency for clinical and research purposes.
• Aggressive Response to Shame (8 items): Displays robust internal consistency, with $\alpha$ coefficients typically falling between .80 and .86. The high inter-item homogeneity confirms that the cognitive defense of honor and retaliatory scripts form a highly unified psychometric core.
• Excitement (5 items): Demonstrates good internal consistency, with $\alpha$ values ranging from .75 to .82, demonstrating reliable assessment of sensation-seeking firearm fascination.
• Comfort with Aggression (6 items): Yields acceptable-to-strong coefficients, with $\alpha$ ranging between .70 and .78. The inclusion of reverse-coded items slightly lowers inter-item covariance relative to purely unipolar scales, but substantially enhances measurement validity against acquiescence bias.
• Power/Safety (4 items): Demonstrates acceptable internal reliability for a brief 4-item screening subscale, with $\alpha$ values ranging from .68 to .76.

Test-Retest Reliability and Temporal Stability

Temporal stability evaluations conducted over a two- to four-week retest interval among non-clinical school cohorts yielded test-retest reliability coefficients ranging from $r = .78$ to $r = .86$ for the composite score, indicating that youth attitudes toward firearms and violent conflict resolution represent relatively stable cognitive-affective schemas rather than transient, day-to-day mood fluctuations. Over longer intervals (e.g., six months to one year), stability coefficients remain moderate ($r = .55$ to $.65$), reflecting developmental sensitivity to environmental changes, social maturation, and violence prevention psychoeducational interventions.

Factor Analysis

The latent structure of the Attitudes Toward Guns and Violence scale was initially derived through comprehensive Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and subsequently confirmed using Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) across independent validation samples.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

During the scale’s derivation phase (Shapiro et al., 1997), an initial pool of over 50 candidate items was administered to an urban and suburban school-aged sample. Principal Axis Factoring followed by oblique (Promax) and orthogonal (Varimax) rotations was performed to evaluate dimensionality, under the empirical expectation that dimensions of violence-related cognition would demonstrate moderate intercorrelations. Factor extraction criteria—including Kaiser’s eigenvalue-greater-than-one rule ($lambda > 1.0$) and Cattell’s scree plot inspection—consistently revealed a dominant four-factor solution:

• Factor 1: Aggressive Response to Shame accounted for the largest percentage of initial variance (approximately 24% to 28% of total variance), featuring primary item loadings ranging from .52 to .78. Items reflecting the absolute necessity of violent retribution to recover lost pride (e.g., Item 2, Item 16) exhibited the strongest loadings on this dimension.
• Factor 2: Excitement emerged cleanly as the second distinct factor (accounting for ~8% to 11% of variance), characterized by primary item loadings between .55 and .81 on statements indexing visceral firearm thrill (e.g., Item 7, Item 11, Item 14). Cross-loadings with the Shame factor were minimal ($< .25$), underscoring the independence of sensation seeking from honor-bound retaliation.
• Factor 3: Comfort with Aggression accounted for ~6% to 8% of variance, with reverse-coded items indexing social and moral aversion to firearms (e.g., Item 8, Item 21, Item 22) loading strongly between .48 and .72.
• Factor 4: Power/Safety accounted for ~5% to 7% of variance, characterized by factor loadings from .50 to .69 across items linking guns and gangs to physical security and compensatory dominance (e.g., Item 3, Item 4, Item 19, Item 23).

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Subsequent structural validation studies using structural equation modeling software confirmed that the four-factor correlated model provided an acceptable-to-superior fit to the empirical data compared to alternative single-factor (unidimensional aggression) or orthogonal two-factor models. Representative goodness-of-fit indices across standardized adolescent samples include:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): .92 to .95, exceeding standard benchmarks for developmental self-report instruments.
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): .91 to .94.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): .048 to .058 (with 90% confidence intervals bounded tightly below .065), demonstrating excellent model parsimony and minimal approximation error.
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): .045 to .052.

Inter-factor correlations in CFA models indicate that while all four dimensions share moderate common variance—reinforcing their integration into a single composite instrument—they retain sufficient unique variance to warrant independent subscale scoring. For example, correlations between Aggressive Response to Shame and Power/Safety typically range between $r = .40$ and $.55$, whereas the correlation between Excitement and Comfort with Aggression hovers around $r = .35$ to $.48$.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The operational specifications, administration protocols, and scoring guidelines for the Attitudes Toward Guns and Violence scale are detailed below:

• Instrument Name: Attitudes Toward Guns and Violence scale (ATGV / ATGVQ)
• Primary Author: Jeremy P. Shapiro, Ph.D.
• Test Type: Standardized self-report cognitive-affective rating scale
• Target Population / Age Range: Children and adolescents enrolled in Grades 3 through 12 (approximate chronological ages: 8 to 18 years)
• Administration Modality: Individual paper-and-pencil questionnaire, group-administered classroom assessment, or secure digital computer-based administration; oral administration by a trained examiner is permissible for younger children or youth with reading difficulties
• Completion Time: Approximately 10 to 15 minutes
• Item Count: 23 direct, declarative items
• Response Format: Developmentally calibrated 3-point categorical rating format:
  • Agree
  • Not sure
  • Disagree
• Subscale Structural Breakdown:
  • Aggressive Response to Shame (8 items): Items 1, 2, 5, 10, 15, 16, 18, 20
  • Excitement (5 items): Items 6, 7, 9, 11, 14
  • Comfort with Aggression (6 items): Items 8, 12, 13, 17, 21, 22
  • Power/Safety (4 items): Items 3, 4, 19, 23
• Scoring System and Item Directionality:
  • Items reflecting pro-violence, retaliatory, or pro-firearm attitudes are scored directly: Agree = 2, Not sure = 1, Disagree = 0 (or alternatively 3, 2, 1 depending on whether zero-based or one-based scoring is utilized in the scoring template).
  • Reverse-Scored Items: Items reflecting anti-violence sentiments, empathetic distress, or the rejection of weapons (specifically Items 8, 12, 13, 17, 21, and 22 within the Comfort with Aggression subscale) must be reverse-coded prior to subscale and total score calculation (e.g., Agree = 0, Not sure = 1, Disagree = 2). High scores on Comfort with Aggression indicate an abnormal absence of anti-violence sentiments.
  • Total Score Calculation: Summing the four subscale scores generates an overall composite score ranging from 0 to 46 (on a 0–2 point scale). Elevated raw scores correspond to higher percentile ranks and standard T-scores against age- and gender-stratified national normative tables.
• Accompanying Materials: The ATGVQ assessment kit historically includes the Aggressive Behavior Checklist (ABC), featuring both teacher-report and student-report forms, providing a comprehensive multi-informant assessment of cognitive attitudes and overt behavioral aggression.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Attitudes Toward Guns and Violence Questionnaire was first formally manualized and published as a standardized commercial psychometric instrument in 2000, following foundational developmental and validation papers published in peer-reviewed scientific journals in 1997 and 1998. An earlier preliminary version was documented in an unpublished report by the Gun Safety Institute in conjunction with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 1994.

Copyright and Licensing Requirements: The standardized test forms, user manual, scoring profiles, and accompanying materials are copyrighted by Western Psychological Services (WPS). Clinicians, forensic evaluators, school districts, and independent researchers seeking to administer the complete, standardized ATGVQ kit for clinical diagnostic or commercial purposes must purchase the authorized assessment materials directly from Western Psychological Services:

• Publisher: Western Psychological Services (WPS)
• Corporate Address: 12031 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, California 90025, USA
• Contact: Phone: (800) 648-8857 | Fax: (310) 478-7838
• Web Portal: www.wpspublish.com

Educational and Research Use: For public health surveillance and non-commercial academic research, the instrument’s item structure and administrative framework have been cataloged in public federal reference compendiums, most notably the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Compendium of Assessment Tools (Measuring Violence-Related Attitudes, Behaviors, and Influences Among Youths, Dahlberg et al., 2005, pp. 53–54). Researchers wishing to adapt or reproduce the instrument for scientific investigations must adhere to ethical fair-use guidelines and, where applicable, secure formal written permission from the copyright holder.

References

Below are authoritative academic references and foundational publications documenting the psychometric development, structural validation, and epidemiological application of the Attitudes Toward Guns and Violence scale:

• Bandura, A. (1999). Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), 193–209. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0303_3
• Berkowitz, L. (1990). On the formation and regulation of anger and aggression: A cognitive-neoassociationistic analysis. American Psychologist, 45(4), 494–503. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.45.4.494
• Crick, N. R., & Dodge, K. A. (1994). A review and reformulation of social information-processing mechanisms in children’s social adjustment. Psychological Bulletin, 115(1), 74–101. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.115.1.74
• Dahlberg, L. L., Toal, S. B., Swahn, M., & Behrens, C. B. (2005). Measuring Violence-Related Attitudes, Behaviors, and Influences Among Youths: A Compendium of Assessment Tools (2nd ed.). Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/YV_Compendium.pdf
• Gilligan, J. (1996). Violence: Our deadly epidemic and its causes. G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
• Gun Safety Institute. (1994). Attitudes towards guns and violence (Unpublished report). Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
• Shapiro, J. P. (2000). Attitudes Toward Guns and Violence Questionnaire (ATGVQ): Manual. Western Psychological Services.
• Shapiro, J. P., Dorman, R. L., Burkey, W. M., Welker, C. J., & Clough, J. B. (1997). Development and factor analysis of a measure of youth attitudes towards guns and violence. Journal of Clinical Child Psychology, 26(3), 311–320. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15374424jccp2603_11
• Shapiro, J. P., Dorman, R. L., Welker, C. J., & Clough, J. B. (1998). Youth attitudes towards guns and violence: Relation with sex, age, ethnic group, and firearm exposure. Journal of Clinical Child Psychology, 27(1), 98–108. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15374424jccp2701_11

Items of the Scale