NIJ FY17 Research on Reducing Violence in Communities

This solicitation will focus on supporting research designed to build knowledge on what it takes to produce sustained community-level reductions in violence. Proposed studies should examine multiple factors, including but not limited to explicit violence prevention initiatives, that may play a role in preventing or reducing violence in a community for an extended period of time. Besides violence prevention initiatives, research should examine factors such as community infrastructure and resources (e.g., access to health care, amount of public housing), local laws and policies (e.g., juvenile curfew laws, police patrol strategies), community norms (e.g., perspectives on carrying a firearm, trust in law enforcement), shared community experiences/beliefs (e.g., exposure to trauma, subject to implicit bias), and collaboration among organizations/agencies working in the community. NIJ is seeking to fund projects that include reviews of existing research and data to more fully identify factors related to sustained violence reduction, and further analyses of identified factors in one or more communities to better understand how they operate individually and collectively to influence levels of violence.