Dr. Petering, Dr. Barr, & Dr. Srivastava presented, “MyPath: Intervention for Reduction in Violence among at Risk Youth”
During the March 20 USC CAIS seminar, Dr. Robin Petering, Dr. Nicholas Barr, and Dr. Ajitesh Srivastava presented a talk titled “MyPath: Mindfulness and Yoga Peer Ambassador Intervention to Reduce Violence in Networks of Homeless Youth.” This project was borne over two years ago during Professor Tambe and Professor Rice’s interdisciplinary AI for Social Good course in which Dr. Petering and Dr. Srivastava were introduced. In the ensuing years, joined by Dr. Barr, they have gone from a rough idea to a pilot study of the MyPath mindfulness intervention, which took place this past summer.
From left to right: Dr. Petering, Dr. Barr, and Dr. Srivastava.
MyPath is motivated by the fact that violence is a big issue in the lives of homeless youth due to a variety of factors such early childhood exposure, the survival strategies needed for life on the streets, and a prevalence of substance abuse. In a survey they conducted to understand the prevalence of violence in the homeless youth community, they found that more than 60% had experienced both physical and verbal conflict in the month prior to the survey, and almost a quarter had experienced such a conflict with a close friend. Violence is a major barrier to exiting homelessness, as it can cause both physical and mental health issues as well as legal trouble in some cases. As Dr. Barr explained, violence is a social issue, spreading similarly to a contagious disease. The question that MyPath seeks to address is how to make non-violence spread like a contagion?
One technique for curbing the urge to act violently is mindfulness—observing one’s thoughts in the present moment without judgement or attempts to change them. Mindfulness is useful for reducing violence since it is generally an impulse behavior or response. Typically, the time from stimulus to the urge to act violently is quick, lasting just seconds. Mindfulness can extend this time frame and interrupt the reaction to carry out violent behavior. However, this raises another question, what is the best way to introduce mindfulness into a network of homeless young people to have the greatest impact on reducing violence across the network.
This is where Dr. Srivastava enters the picture. Using tools from the mathematical fields of graph theory and probability, he models the social network of homeless youth as a directed graph of violent and non-violent nodes, with violence acting as a non-progressive diffusion process, meaning violent nodes have the potential to become non-violent and vice versa. Then, using a probabilistic model of a node’s violence and propensity for becoming non-violent given a mindfulness intervention, based on survey data, he developed an algorithm to choose the k individuals from the set of violent individuals that will minimize the expected violence across the network should they become non-violent. Some of the challenges associated with developing this algorithm were the uncertain structure of the homeless youth social network and coming up with a formula to measure an individual’s probability of becoming non-violent given the available survey data.
Using individuals selected by Dr. Srivastava’s algorithm as peer leaders, Dr. Petering and Dr. Barr conducted a pilot of the mindfulness and yoga intervention in the summer of 2018. They selected 14 of the top 40 individuals as peer ambassadors and invited them to a day-long workshop in mindfulness and yoga. In the following 10 weeks, open classes were held at the drop-in center frequented by the youth in the study, and 10 of the peer leaders came to eight or more follow up sessions, representing a high retention rate for the intervention. A follow-up survey also found that the peer leaders reported a significant increase in the practice of mindfulness and yoga as well as a significant decrease in incidences of physical and verbal violence. Following the positive results of this pilot, MyPath will be implemented at the Safe Place for Youth drop-in center in Venice with funding from the Department of Mental Health.
Click below to view the MyPath seminar presentation.
