The Society for Social Work and Research (SSWR) gave its 2011 Excellence in Research Award to USC School of Social Work professor Ron Astor for his study on school violence in Israel schools.

Astor, the school's Richard M. and Ann L. Thor Professor of Urban Social Development, won the award for the article "School Violence and Theoretically Atypical Schools: The Principal's Centrality in Orchestrating Safe Schools," which was published in the American Educational Research Journal.

Each year, SSWR gives the Excellence in Research Award to one article that it considers the best of that year.

"The SSWR award is very meaningful because it was given by our peers and because it meant social work was recognized in basic science. They recognized the methodology," Astor said. "It was really refreshing to get that."

Astor's study, which was co-authored with doctoral candidate Jose Nunez Estrada and Rami Benbenishty of Israel's Bar Ilan University, examined nine "atypical" schools in Israel that report little campus violence despite being located in violent communities. The research team determined that the most important variable in these schools was the leadership and that principals who emphasized school reform were the most successful in keeping violence at bay.

"We were blown away by how important that focus of the principal was. We left after three years convinced that you had to involve principals or else interventions wouldn't work. And there wasn't anything in the literature about that," Astor said. "It may not seem earth-shattering, but now we have a whole science based on the variables we saw."