Reducing violence in poor urban areas of Honduras by building community resilience through community-based interventions

Abstract

Objectives: To examine the impact of a 3 year community-based violence prevention intervention on risk of violence and social capital in two poor urban communities in Honduras in 2011-2014.

Methods: A quasi-experimental design pre and post implementation of the intervention was conducted based on data from two randomly selected samples using the same structured questionnaire in 2011 and in 2014.

Results: Community members had a 42 % lower risk of violence in 2014 compared to 2011. There was a positive relation between participation in the intervention and structural social capital, and participants had more than twice the likelihood of engaging in citizenship activities compared to the general population.

Conclusions: The intervention contributed to decreasing violence and increasing community resilience in two urban areas in Honduras. Citizenship activities and active community participation in the violence prevention agenda rather than social trust and cohesion characteristics was affected by the intervention. This research introduces important lessons learned to future researchers aiming to retrieve very sensitive data in a similarly violent setting, and provides strong research opportunities within areas, which to this date remain undiscovered.

Keywords: Intervention; Resilience; Social capital; Violence prevention.