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THE PREVALENCE OF WORKPLACE VIOLENCE

Until recently, estimates of the prevalence of workplace violence varied widely and were of dubious credibility. Accurate surveillance of the forms and frequency of workplace violence requires representative sampling procedures and standardized definitions, measures and reporting mechanisms (Peek-Asa et al., 1998). Although the literature contains numerous estimates of the prevalence of workplace violence, the data on which these estimates are based have a number of methodological limitations, precluding the drawing of valid conclusions about the degree to which members of the workforce are exposed to violent behavior.

The Accuracy of Prevalence Estimates

These methodological limitations include, data sources that contain inaccuracies, small and convenience samples that are not representative of a broad or specific population, reporting periods that vary across studies, and inconsistent definitions and operationalizations of workplace violence. In addition, few of the estimates provide data related to demographic, occupational, or other predictors of exposure to the various forms and sources of workplace violence, information that is critical to identifying the workers at greatest risk and developing intervention programs to address and prevent exposure to such behavior.

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Reducing Workplace Violence
One of the more unfortunate additions to the modern American colloquial lexicon is the phrase ‘to go postal’. According to the Urban Dictionary‘postal’ or to go postal refers to going crazy or insane and to act irrationally. The same dictionary states that the term came into use after...
(People, Risk, and Security: How to prevent your greatest asset from becoming your greatest liability)
Types of Workplace Violence
It is important to understand that not all workplace violence is the same. In 1995, the California Occupation Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) developed descriptions of four types of workplace violence that are still used as guidelines: I. Criminal intent—The perpetrator has no legitimate...
(People, Risk, and Security: How to prevent your greatest asset from becoming your greatest liability)
Robert Simon's Cycle of Workplace Violence
Addressing Type III workplace violence requires delving into the subject of dysfunctional behavior by an employee. There are certain events that may trigger workplace violence. Usually an employee will display behav?ior that may serve as an early warning. It is important that managers and supervisors...
(People, Risk, and Security: How to prevent your greatest asset from becoming your greatest liability)
Workplace Violence
Violent events occurring in workplaces create much sensational publicity, and the result is widespread fear and mythmaking. For example, the few instances of employees “going postal” and creating havoc in places where they work or had worked, is so firmly ingrained in the public consciousness that...
(Strategic Interventions for People in Crisis, Trauma, and Disaster: Revised Edition)
Prevalence Estimates
Bearing these three limitations in mind, the most accurate estimates of the prevalence of workplace violence will be derived from large samples that are constructed so as to represent a known population. In the past three years, data from three such surveys (one American and two Canadian) have become...
(Occupational Health and Safety for Small and Medium Sized Enterprises.)
Prevalence Estimates: How Many People?
It is no easy task to get a precise handle on how many people who suffer from mental illness reside in our prisons. Prevalence estimates vary widely. A highly cited paper by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reports that 56 percent of state prisoners and 45 percent of federal prisoners had a mental...
(Routledge Handbook on American Prisons)
Estimation of Calorie Norms and Measurement of Food Intakes: Some Implications for the Magnitudes of the Prevalence of Undernutrition in India
J.V. Meenakshi and Brinda Viswanathan Abstract This paper highlights the significant measurement issues in the computation of the prevalence of inadequate calorie intakes in India using NSS data. It focuses on the setting of appropriate norms or cut-offs which determine adequacy or inadequacy,...
(Perspectives on Economic Development and Policy in India: In Honour of Suresh D. Tendulkar)
Sequential Confidence Set and Point Estimation of the Population Gini Index by Controlling Accuracies Relative to the Population Mean
Economic inequality exists in almost all aspects of life. It is very important to periodically measure the inequality for a region or a country of interest to gauge the effect of current economic policies in order to critically consider possible paths for future policies. Among many available...
(Gini Inequality Index: Methods and Applications)