Table 1.

Child and adolescent's variables of interest for the study: Instruments applied to mothers and/or adolescents and definition of variables

	Mother as informant		Adolescent as informant
Variables	Instrument	Definition	Instrument	Definition
Exposure to violence at home	Brazilian version of the World Studies of Abuse in the Family Environment (WorldSAFE) Core Questionnaire (Bordin et al., 2009)	Any severe physical punishment by one or both parents in the past 12 months (at least one positive item from the 8 items listed in Table 2—possible answers for all items: “no” [0], “yes” [1])	Brazilian version of the World Studies of Abuse in the Family Environment (WorldSAFE) Core Questionnaire (Bordin et al., 2009)	Any severe physical punishment by one or both parents in the past 12 months (at least one positive item from the 8 items listed in Table 2—possible answers for all items: “no” [0], “yes” [1])
Exposure to violence at the community: Victimization events that occurred outside the school and home environments	Investigation of 8 topics (beatings and muggins, forced entry, being chased, arrests, threats, knife attacks, shootings, sexual molestation) selected from the Survey of Exposure to Community Violence—Self Report Version, developed at the National Institute of Mental Health by Richters and Saltzman (1990). Differently from the original Self Report Version, two separate items investigated beatings and muggins, and two new items were added by our research team (being around a shoot‐out and suffering death threats)	Any victimization by community violence in the past 12 months (at least one positive item from the 11 items listed in Table 2—possible answers for all items: “no” [0], “yes” [1])	Investigation of 8 topics (beatings and muggins, forced entry, being chased, arrests, threats, knife attacks, shootings, sexual molestation) selected from the Survey of Exposure to Community Violence—Self Report Version, developed at the National Institute of Mental Health by Richters and Saltzman (1990). Differently from the original Self Report Version, two separate items investigated beatings and muggins, and two new items were added by our research team (being around a shoot‐out and suffering death threats)	Any victimization by community violence in the past 12 months (at least one positive item from the 11 items listed in Table 2—possible answers for all items: “no” [0], “yes” [1])
Exposure to violence at the community: Eye‐witnessed events that occurred outside the school and home environments	None	None	Same topics and items related to the occurrence of eye‐witnessed real life events (media exposure excluded)	Any eye‐witnessed community violence in the past 12 months (at least one positive item from the 11 items listed in Table 2—possible answers for all items: “no” [0], “yes” [1])
Exposure to violence at school	None	None	Arora's “My Life in School” (MLS) checklist (Arora, 1994; Arora & Thompson, 1987). Selected and modified items previously used in a Norwegian study with schoolchildren (Rønning, Handegaard, & Sourander, 2004)	Three types of peer harassment events (any event occurring more than once in the past 6 months): physical aggression (4 items), verbal harassment (5 items), and social manipulation (6 items). Any peer harassment corresponds to at least one event occurring more than once from the 15 items listed in Table 3—possible answers for all items: “not at all” (0), “once” (1), “more than once” (2)
Mother‐perceived bullying victimization at school	One question developed by the authors: “Was the child threatened, maltreated, or chased by peers at school?”	A yes response identifies victimization by school violence in the past 12 months	Not applicable	Not applicable
Self‐perceived bullying victimization at school	Not applicable	Not applicable	After defining bullying (when one or more school peers are repeatedly doing bad things to you such as name‐calling, threatening, hitting, spreading rumours about you, excluding you from the group, or teasing you to hurt your feelings), one question developed by the authors was asked: “How often have you been bullied in the past 6 months?”	Possible answers for this question: “not at all” (0), “less than once a week” (1), “more than once a week” (2), “almost every day” (3). Self‐perceived bullying victimization in the past 6 months corresponds to an answer of more than once a week or almost every day
Mental health clinical problems based on SDQ	Brazilian version of the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) for parents of 4‐ to 17‐year olds (Fleitlich‐Bilyk, 2002)	SDQ scale scores in the clinical range according to pre‐established cut‐off points based on normative data from large population‐based studies conducted in the United Kingdom (details at http://www.sdqinfo.com)	Brazilian version of the self‐rated SDQ for 11 to 17‐year olds (Fleitlich‐Bilyk, 2002)	SDQ scale scores in the clinical range according to pre‐established cut‐off points based on normative data from large population‐based studies conducted in the United Kingdom (details at http://www.sdqinfo.com)
Mental health clinical problems based on Achenbach's instruments	Braziian version of the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) (Bordin et al., 2013)	CBCL scale T‐scores in the clinical range according to pre‐established cut‐off points based on normative data from the United States (Bordin et al., 2013)	Brazilian version of the Youth Self‐Report (YSR/11–18) (Bordin et al., 2013)	YSR scale T‐scores in the clinical range according to pre‐established cut‐off points based on normative data from the United States (Bordin et al., 2013)
Symptoms of post‐traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)	None	None	20 DSM IV PTSD symptoms (listed in Table 4), and one impairment item were investigated by the corresponding items from the Brazilian version of the Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia for School‐Age Children/ Present and Lifetime Version (K‐SADS‐PL) (Brasil & Bordin, 2010).	PTSD symptoms were investigated only when the adolescent identified one traumatic event currently most bothersome among all previously reported violence exposure events and/or stressful life events occurred in the past 12 months. Possible answers for all items: “no” (0), “yes” (1). The authors of the current paper determined that adolescents with three or more PTSD symptoms and impairment were those more severely affected by the traumatic event