Open Case Studies: School Shootings in the United States

The link to the dashboard described in this case study is here.

To access the GitHub Repository for this case study see here: https://github.com/opencasestudies/ocs-bp-school-shootings-dashboard/.

You may also access and download the data using our OCSdata package. To learn more about this package including examples, see this link. Here is how you would install this package:

install.packages("OCSdata")

This case study is part of a series of public health case studies for the Bloomberg American Health Initiative.

For users or instructors who only wish to look at the basics of how to create a dashboard in R with the flexdashboard package, please see the Dashboard Basics Section.

Disclaimer: The purpose of the Open Case Studies project is to demonstrate the use of various data science methods, tools, and software in the context of messy, real-world data. A given case study does not cover all aspects of the research process, is not claiming to be the most appropriate way to analyze a given data set, and should not be used in the context of making policy decisions without external consultation from scientific experts.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 (CC BY-NC 3.0) United States License.

To cite this case study please use:

Wright, Carrie and Ontiveros, Michael, and Meng, Qier and Jager, Leah and Taub, Margaret and Hicks, Stephanie. (2020). https://github.com//opencasestudies/ocs-bp-school-shootings-dashboard. Open Case Studies: School Shootings in the United States (Version v1.0.0).

The total reading time for this case study is calculated via koRpus and shown below:

Reading Time	Method
110 minutes	koRpus

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Readability Score:

A readability index estimates the reading difficulty level of a particular text. Flesch-Kincaid, FORCAST, and SMOG are three common readability indices that were calculated for this case study via koRpus. These indices provide an estimation of the minimum reading level required to comprehend this case study by grade and age.

Text language: en 

index	grade	age
Flesch-Kincaid	9	14
FORCAST	10	15
SMOG	11	16

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Motivation

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This case study is motivated by this article:

Flannery, D. J., Modzeleski, W. & Kretschmar, J. M. Violence and School Shootings. Curr Psychiatry Rep 15, 331 (2013). DOI: 10.1007/s11920-012-0331-6

The article explores characteristics of school shootings and violence in schools and discusses why these events may occur, as well as their impact on the communities in which they occur.

The article also states that the shooters are most commonly white males, but that many previous studies of shooter characteristics could not identify any particular “profile” of shooters.

“To date, studies of school shootings have concluded that no consistent and reliable profile of school shooters exist…”

However previous studies note some commonalities such as:

“…most shooters were depressed, had experienced some significant loss, felt persecuted or bullied by others, and had prior difficulty coping or had previously tried suicide.”

Therefore in our dashboard we will examine how often a shooter was male or attempted or committed suicide during an event.

Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

"School shootings are not all the same and may require different approaches to prevention and treatment, especially with respect to identifying risk factors at the individual, school or community levels, and particularly with regard to examining the role that mental health issues may play to increase risk for perpetration.

The field needs to know more about shooting incidents that are averted, those that result in injury but not death and about the characteristics of the more common occurrence of single homicide school shootings."