Foundational Research and Data for Meaningful Change
The CVP’s research on violence prevention offers the clarity needed to inform policies, guide interventions, and inspire hope.
What We Do
By expanding the boundaries of what is known, we expand the boundaries of what is possible.
Rigorous research on the causes, consequences, and prevention of violence is the foundation of our work at CVP. We conduct translational research, which means that we design and conduct studies to produce meaningful, actionable results that directly benefit health and well-being through a deeper understanding of violence and effective prevention strategies.
Topical Focus
Firearm violence has long been our central focus and continues to be a substantial area of our work. However, we have expanded our scope to address violence in every form, recognizing that many of the risk and protective factors underlying violence are shared. We are especially interested in studying the people and places that face the highest burden from violence.
Interdisciplinary approach
Violence is a public health problem with physical, psychological, and societal effects, but it is also a structural problem, a criminal justice problem, and an economic problem. As such, it is best approached from many perspectives brought together in one place at one time. Our interdisciplinary approach integrates knowledge and methods from different fields of study for a hybrid research strategy necessary to tackle such a complex challenge.
Meet our team to learn about our researchers’ areas of expertise.
Diverse methods
Our investigators utilize a range of quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods to understand violence, how it affects peoples’ lives, and develop and evaluate effective prevention strategies. Cutting-edge causal inference techniques that explore cause-and-effect relationships, including risk and protective factors for suicide and homicide.
Advancing machine learning applications that use large datasets to predict violence.
Ongoing survey research to understand violence across populations and over time, including the California Safety and Wellbeing Survey (CSaWS) and the Life in America Survey on political violence.
Applying implementation science and participatory research principles to engage impacted populations in research on community-centered strategies to reduce violence and address systemic and social factors contributing to violence.
Evaluations of the implementation and effectiveness of firearm policies.
Only in California
Access to quality data is vital for research, and California has a record of providing and protecting researcher access to crucial data that isn’t available in any other state. For example, since 1989, VPRP researchers have used California’s unique Dealer’s Record of Sale (DROS) data to conduct ground-breaking research on firearm-related violence that simply couldn’t be done anywhere else. We are glad to be conducting this work and encourage other states to develop similar datasets and access for violence prevention researchers.
Publicly available datasets
Background Check and Licensing Policies Dataset
This dataset includes state-level data from 1980-2019 on factors relevant to the design, implementation, and enforcement of background checks and licensing policies for firearm transfers. This includes policy details (e.g. fingerprinting required, license duration), information about related policies (e.g. state prohibiting criteria), and criminal history database details. Data are collated from multiple public sources.
The dataset is a collaboration with the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions and made available via the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) on OpenICSPR.
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