Christina M. Mitchell

Alternative treatments for troubled youth : the case of diversion from the justice system

1 Historical Context.- 2 Major Theoretical Positions.- 3 Empirical History of Treatment Efficacy.- 4 Theories of Delinquency Intervention and Treatment Research Strategies.- 5 Study I and Study II: Research Methods.- 6 Study I: Intervention Process and Outcome Results.- 7 Study II: Intervention Process and Outcome Results.- 8 Assessment of the Volunteers.- 9 Models of Delinquency Intervention.- 10 Systemic Impact: Methods and Procedures.- 11 Systemic Impact: Results.- 12 Conclusions and Implications.- Appendixes.- A. MSU Adolescent Diversion Project.- B. Intervention.- C. Life Domain.- D. Self-Report Delinquency (SRD).- E. Semantic Differential.- F. Peer Nominations: Ratings.- References.

Empirical History of Treatment Efficacy

This chapter presents a comprehensive review of the literature concerned with the efficacy of interventions with delinquent youth. This review was undertaken in order to put the research reported in Chapters 4 through 11 in its empirical context. This review used the specific methods of formal meta-analysis. After a brief presentation of the need for meta-analysis, the methods of the review are presented, followed by the results and a discussion of the implications.

Theories of Delinquency Intervention and Treatment Research Strategies

This chapter discusses how the Adolescent Diversion Project attempted to bridge the gap between delinquency intervention theories and treatment research methods. Thus it introduces both the intervention theories and the research methods used by the project. Because of the complexity of the issues we tried to address, two distinct research strategies were utilized—both experimental and correlational. Therefore, the questions that each strategy attempted to address will be described here as well.

Major Theoretical Positions

Theoretical approaches to explanations of troubled youth have closely paralleled more general deviance theory and sociopolitical trends (Elliot et al., 1985; Empey, 1982). It has been difficult to discern whether deviance theories evolved from independent scientific thinking or emerged as explanations for the preferences of the policies of the sociopolitical context (Empey, 1982). Consistent with this observation, this chapter will present the major theoretical positions that provided the context within which our treatments of troubled youth have been developed and tested.

Study I and Study II: Research Methods

The methods used to implement and evaluate the two studies will be presented. Study I is first described in considerable detail. Because many of the procedures for Study II were similar to those of Study I, only the differences will be presented for Study II. The focus of the methods in this chapter is on the youth participants. This section begins with a discussion of the referral and selection process for the youth and their families. A brief discussion of the recruitment and selection of the student volunteers follows. Next, the six conditions—five intervention groups and one “treatment-as-usual” control group—are presented. The section closes with an explication of the various measures used.

Systemic Impact: Results

In this chapter, the results of four models for exploring systemic impact are first examined. Following a presentation of the results of each of the four models, the implications or these findings will be discussed.

Models of Delinquency Intervention

In this chapter, the interventions used by the Adolescent Diversion Project are examined from an individual perspective. This means that rather than examining differences between groups of subjects who received similar treatments, individual youth—volunteer pairs are the unit of analysis. Several reasons prompted this approach. First, each youth is a unique person who may have a different pattern of delinquent behavior that exists for different reasons and that may respond to different interventions. Furthermore, youth within any given treatment condition might vary in the pattern of specific interventions that they received. By disaggregating individuals from the treatment groups into which they had been randomly placed, the mechanisms by which specific interventions operated could perhaps be discovered. Our hope was first, to understand how specific intervention activities affected delinquency. Then, by examining how specific interventions were distributed across treatment conditions, it might be possible to determine the mechanisms by which the treatment conditions affected delinquency.

Systemic Impact: Methods and Procedures

Having assessed the impact of the Adolescent Diversion Project on the youth and the change agents and explored the relationship between process variables and outcome, we now turn our attention to systemic impact. This chapter presents a discussion of the four models used to assess systemic impact. First, an overview sets the context from which these analyses of system-level impact grew. Following this, the methods used to examine each of the four models are presented. This chapter and the next draw heavily on John Saul’s (1981) masters thesis. His contribution is acknowledged.

Assessment of the Volunteers

An additional aspect of the present research concerns the individuals recruited to work with the juvenile delinquents. The use of volunteers, or nonprofessionals, in community interventions has been promoted in the field of community psychology for the last two decades (Rappaport, 1977; Sobey, 1970; Zax & Specter, 1974). The emphasis on using nonprofessionals, either as volunteers or as paid staff, arose from two main criticisms of traditional psychological intervention. First, the limited pool of professional psychologists substantially restricted their availability to the large numbers of people potentially needing psychological services (Albee, 1959; Pearl & Riessman, 1965). Second, the effectiveness of traditional psychological therapies came under serious scrutiny at about the same time that the positive qualities of nonprofessionals were recognized (Heller & Monahan, 1977). These two perspectives resulted in the increased use of nonprofessionals as service providers. The movement toward the use of nonprofessionals was also encouraged by the notion that nonprofessionals, as well as their clients, benefitted from the experience. This notion has been termed the helper therapy principle (Riessman, 1969).