Department of Family Therapy Dissertations and Applied Clinical Projects

Date of Award

2022

Document Type

Dissertation - NSU Access Only

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Advisor

Anne Rambo

Abstract

The United States has seen significantly more gun violence on school grounds than other high-income countries across the globe (Grinshteyn & Hemenway, 2019). On February 14, 2018, right here in our very home of Broward County, we experienced one of the most violent, deadly mass school shootings, when 17 people were killed and 17 others injured at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. In the wake of this tragedy, scores of stakeholders, advocates, and volunteers from all over have banded together to seek out solutions for safety and prevention. Still, school shooters are finding themselves slipping through the cracks that are difficult to see. This dissertation presents various risk factors of school shooters as they relate to many different contextual areas. Prevention efforts have found success, but also a fair share of limitations. There is limited information available on teachers’ perceptions of potential risk factors. Teachers hold an inherent role of gatekeeper, as they often are the first-hand receivers of information from their students. They also are required to respond and act when they hear potential threats of violence. Thus, the purpose of this study was to explore the lived experience of selected teachers, still recovering from our district-wide trauma, as they made sense of the training they have received about risk factors. From exploring this experience, we are better able to understand how these teachers process this emotionally charged information, and a hypothesis about how to best support teachers is presented.

Download
To access this thesis/dissertation you must have a valid nova.edu OR mynsu.nova.edu email address and create an account for NSUWorks.

Free My Thesis

If you are the author of this work and would like to grant permission to make it openly accessible to all, please click the Free My Thesis button.

  Contact Author

Share

COinS