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Abstract
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VioLIt summary:
OBJECTIVE:
This study by Bry investigated whether a school-based preventive intervention for high-risk adolescents will show long-term effects of reducing school and community delinquency problems and substance abuse.
METHODOLOGY:
This study was a quasi-experimental design and employed forty-four males and twenty-two females. The average age of the adolescents was fifteen and a half. Forty-two percent were black and fifty-eight percent white. The subjects had previously been selected because they exhibited at least two of the following predictive characteristics: low academic motivation, a feeling of distance from the family, and/or referrals for discipline problems. Subjects were paired,where one was assigned to the intervention group and the other was placed in a control group.
The experimenters entered the schools each week, recorded the daily attendance and discipline referrals of the intervention subjects, and completed individual Weekly Report Cards. Then experimenters met with the intervention students in small groups. The Report cards were distributed and discussed during these meetings. Teachers then discussed with the student what s/he could possibly do in order to improve that teachers impression of his/her behavior.
The students were judged based on the following criteria: a) coming to class on time; b) bringing necessary materials for class; c) completing the classwork; d) satisfactory behavior; and d) completing homework. Each subject was rated according to the extent of problem: 0=no serious problems, 1=a failure to be promoted into the next grade level which could be reversed by attending summer school, 2=a reversible failure to be promoted plus one of the other problems or a failure to be promoted which could not be reversed, 3=a reversible failure to be promoted plus at least two of the other problems or an irreversible failure to be promoted plus at least one other problem.
For the five year follow-up, the subjects were forty males and twenty females from the one-year follow-up study: thirty were intervention subjects and thirty were controls; thirty-two were suburban, twenty-eight urban; twenty-two were black, thirty-eight white. Average age was nineteen and a half. Both lists of control and experimental group members were sent to the county probation department to check against their files seven years after the subjects had been selected for the program. The appearance of a young person's name in the county files indicated a serious or chronic involvement with the criminal justice system, and an arrest was considered to be drug-related only if the probation officer judged it to be so.
FINDINGS/DISCUSSION:
A Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-ranks test showed that there was a significant difference between the intervention and control groups concerning school-based problems. There was a significant difference between the number of subjects from the intervention and control group who had never been employed. There was also a significant difference in the numbers of intervention and control group members who reported abuse of drugs. A significant difference was present concerning the amount of reported criminal behavior between experimental and control groups.
For the five year follow-up, there was no evidence of intervention effects upon drug-related arrests. There was evidence, however, of intervention effects upon total delinquency; significantly fewer of the intervention subjects had county court files than the control subjects. Only three of the intervention group had files, whereas nine of the control group did.
AUTHOR'S RECOMMENDATIONS:
The author recommended that the impact of factors such as harmful attributions, inflated expectations, nonspecific factors, over justification, and overidentification must be investigated further. The author argued that a series of limited, noncritical studies should be used beginning with the relationship between mental health and a particular factor, moving to its role in the achievement of proximal goals in a preventive intervention, and finally to its role in goal achievement.
(CSPV Abstract - Copyright © 1992-2007 by the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence, Institute of Behavioral Science, Regents of the University of Colorado)
KW - Promising Program Reference
KW - Juvenile Offender
KW - Juvenile Delinquency
KW - Juvenile Substance Use
KW - Juvenile Crime
KW - Crime Intervention
KW - Crime Prevention
KW - Delinquency Intervention
KW - Delinquency Prevention
KW - Substance Use Intervention
KW - Substance Use Prevention
KW - Drug Use Intervention
KW - Drug Use Prevention
KW - Intervention Program
KW - Prevention Program
KW - Follow-Up Studies
KW - School Based
KW - Program Effectiveness
KW - Program Evaluation |