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Is More Necessarily Better? School Security and Perceptions of Safety among Students and Parents in the United States

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Abstract

The use of security measures within schools has increased dramatically over the past few decades. These proliferations are often touted by teachers, school administrators, politicians, and the public as necessary for improving student safety. Though research in this area is growing, we know little about how increased use of school security measures relates to both student and parental perceptions of school safety. Using data from wave one of the 2002 Educational Longitudinal Study, the current study investigates the relationship between the use of security measures in schools and student and parent assessments of safety. Findings from multi-level models indicate that school security measures are, generally, related to decreased perceptions of safety by both parents and students. Implications of these findings are addressed.

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Notes

  1. Although a number of the effect sizes for some of these relationships are small, the results of each analysis remained substantively identical across a wide-range of bootstrapped samples in both imputed and non-imputed data demonstrating strong stability in the findings.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, Bowling Green State University, 232 Williams Hall, Bowling Green, OH, 43403, USA

    Thomas J. Mowen

  2. Department of Criminal Justice and Sociology, University of Wyoming, 1000 E. University Ave., Dept. 3197, Laramie, WY, 82071, USA

    Adrienne Freng

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  1. Thomas J. Mowen
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  2. Adrienne Freng
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Correspondence to Thomas J. Mowen.

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This research was supported in part by the Center for Family and Demographic Research, Bowling Green State University, which has core funding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (P2CHD050959).

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Mowen, T.J., Freng, A. Is More Necessarily Better? School Security and Perceptions of Safety among Students and Parents in the United States. Am J Crim Just 44, 376–394 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-018-9461-7

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