By Maury Nation

The author reports on the motivation for developing and performing the Nashville Longitudinal Study of Youth Safety and Wellbeing (NLSYSW) as well as the project’s activities and outcomes, and resulting artifacts. The work of the NLSYSW was organized into working groups corresponding to the principal required tasks to develop the multi-sectoral dataset. The four data collection working groups focused on the following: Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) administrative data; MNPS survey data; contextual data; and youth mapping data. Two data management working groups focused on data anonymization and data archiving. The report describes the major tasks of each working group, the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic disruptions, and NLSYSW outputs and artifacts. The major output of the study was a compilation of multiple data sources with over two million observations and 450 variables; the report provides a list of data sources with the years of data included and a short description of each data set, and directs readers to the user guide and codebook sections for complete details.

Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University, 2023. 167p.

By Danielle M. Olson, Tyler Musgrave, Divya Gumudavelly, Chardee Galan, Sarita Schoenebeck, D. Fox Harrell, and Riana E. Anderson

Police brutality—including the incidents that mobilized collective outrage and action across the world during the summer of 2020—has negatively impacted the psychological health of Black youth for generations. Police harassment is a persistent form of racial discrimination that Black youth frequently navigate (Brunson, 2007), and particularly as a consequence of vicarious trauma via social media, it has been associated with depressive and anxious sequelae (e.g., Tynes et al., 2019). While Black youth are faced with policing experiences in vivo and in vitro, many studies of the psychological impact of policing are contained within traditional retrospective surveys, which limits our understanding of youth’s in-the-moment perceptions and desired concurrent actions. To expand the efforts to assess and redress youth’s experiences with police encounters, this manuscript details the development of an afterschool program that supports adolescents in the creation of a series of video game and virtual reality (VR) narratives. A participatory design method was utilized to co-create the perception of policing experiences with Detroit high school students enrolled in a computer science course, allowing them to actualize their experiences “on screen” and work towards redressing these experiences through co-construction and virtual activism.

United States, Journal of Youth Development Vol 18 Issue 3. 2023, 18pg