Turkish adolescents' attitudes toward violence

Attitude toward violence is a good predictor of violent behavior (Gellman & Delucia-Waack, 2006). Professionals, administrators, and teachers may develop appropriate strategies and intervention methods by assessing adolescents' attitudes toward violence. Moreover, measuring attitudes toward violence can be useful in preventing violent behavior and assessing the effectiveness of training programs. In the present study, the Attitudes Towards Violence Scale (ATVS; Funk Elliott, Urman, Flores, & Mock, 1999) was studied with a group of Turkish adolescents. The original ATVS, a 15-item, 5-point, Likert-type instrument, was developed to measure attitudes toward violence among adolescence (Funk et al., 1999) with two subscales as "reactive violence" and "culture of violence." The sample of the study was 1953 students from 18 different high schools from 10 high school types in two cities; one of which is on the Blacksea region and the other is on the Middle Anatolian Region. In this group, there were 897 men (45.9%) and 1047 women (53.6%). Confirmatory factor analyses were specified and estimated. Because the factor structure of the original scale was not confirmed in the Turkish population, exploratory factor analysis was performed with a principal component analysis and varimax rotation. Results showed that the Turkish version of the ATVS contained two distinct, but related components. These two components are named as "reactive violence" and "culture of violence." Further evidence for construct validity was found through the standardized component loadings, which were all positive and statistically significant, ranging from .27 to .80. The reliability of the scale was investigated in terms of internal consistency of the 13 scale items and was found to be .78.