A Qualitative Approach to Modeling School Violence Using System Dynamics
Arham Jain
03/09/2026
Violence is an increasing problem in schools across the United States, and the most extreme form of school violence, gun violence, is the leading cause of death among children and adolescents in the country. Previous studies have examined static relationships between school climate and aggression; however, few studies have examined the dynamic interaction of stress, support, and incidents over time. Therefore, in this study, we develop a system dynamics model of school climate that qualitatively examines the conditions under which a school climate might become stable or unstable. First, we examined the School Survey on Crime and Safety (SSOCS) data from the four completed survey years (2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022), and organized 23 items into three indices of stress, support, and incidents. These showed consistent positive correlations between stress and incidents (r = 0.60 – 0.79), which are used to confirm the sign of the modeled associations, not causal direction, and are not used to estimate the parameters. We then built a stock and flow diagram with five of those coefficients, the ones that correspond to the reinforcing loop between stress and incidents, and the balancing loop between support and incidents. We conducted targeted simulations and a one-at-a-time sensitivity analysis, which showed a dramatic threshold effect and that the modeled system can rapidly fall into crisis once it reaches a tipping point. Notably, the speed of administrative response emerged as a major stabilizing factor within the model, highlighting how it plays a crucial role in preventing collapse. The coefficients are illustrative and not necessarily calibrated; the results are thus hypotheses generated by the model, suggesting that institutional response capacity may play an important role.