Anderson Valerie R, Rubino Laura L, McKenna Nicole C
School of Criminal Justice, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA.
Am J Community Psychol. 2021 Mar;67(1-2):35-49. doi: 10.1002/ajcp.12475. Epub 2020 Nov 5.
The increased proportion of juvenile court-involved girls has spurred interest to implement and evaluate services to reduce girls' system involvement. The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of a family-based intervention by using a dominant sequential mixed methods evaluation approach. First, we examined quantitative data using a quasi-experimental design to determine whether the family-based intervention reduced recidivism among court-involved girls. Propensity score matching (PSM) was used to construct statistically equivalent groups to compare one-year recidivism outcomes for girls who received the court-run family-based intervention (n = 181) to a group of girls on probation who did not receive the intervention (n = 803). Qualitative interviews (n = 39) were conducted to contextualize the quantitative findings and highlighted the circumstances that family-focused interventions for court-involved girls. Girls who received the program had slightly lower recidivism rates following the intervention. The qualitative findings contextualized the quasi-experimental results by providing an explanation as to the girls' family circumstances and insights into the mechanisms of the intervention. Results highlighted the importance of family-focused interventions for juvenile justice-involved girls. These findings have practical and policy implications for the use interventions-beyond the individual level-with adjudicated girls and offer suggestions for ways to improve their effectiveness using a community psychology lens. In addition, this paper includes a discussion of evaluating of juvenile court programming from a community psychology perspective including strengths, challenges, and considerations for future work in this area.
涉及少年法庭的女孩比例增加，引发了人们对实施和评估减少女孩卷入该系统的服务的兴趣。本研究的目的是通过使用一种占主导地位的顺序混合方法评估方法，来检验基于家庭的干预措施的有效性。首先，我们使用准实验设计来检验定量数据，以确定基于家庭的干预措施是否能减少涉及法庭的女孩的再犯率。倾向得分匹配法（PSM）用于构建统计学上等效的组，以比较接受法庭运行的基于家庭的干预措施的女孩（n = 181）与未接受干预措施的缓刑女孩组（n = 803）的一年再犯结果。进行了定性访谈（n = 39），以便将定量研究结果置于具体情境中，并突出针对涉及法庭的女孩的以家庭为重点的干预措施的情况。接受该项目的女孩在干预后再犯率略低。定性研究结果通过解释女孩的家庭情况以及对干预机制的洞察，将准实验结果置于具体情境中。结果突出了以家庭为重点的干预措施对涉及少年司法的女孩的重要性。这些发现对使用超越个体层面的干预措施来处理被判定有罪的女孩具有实际和政策意义，并从社区心理学的角度为提高其有效性的方法提供了建议。此外，本文还从社区心理学的角度讨论了对少年法庭项目的评估，包括该领域未来工作的优势、挑战和注意事项。
