Improving the Accuracy, Utility, and Equity of Risk Assessment in the Juvenile Justice System: A Mixed-Method Study

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Project Summary Preventing adolescent delinquency, especially engagement in violence perpetration, is a critical public health aim. Data- driven risk assessments are the dominant paradigm for (a) prioritizing need and (b) selecting which clinical services are needed for the approximate 2 million adolescents involved with the juvenile justice system annually. Ultimately, these data analytic tools generate a “risk score” that guide referrals for behavioral and mental health services. Despite their widespread use, however, critical limitations for these structured risk assessments persist. These include (a) measuring dynamic processes decontextualized from adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), (b) questionable validity in assessing risk in diverse adolescent populations, and (c) a narrow focus on violent behavior, with little consideration of critical mental health concerns (e.g., emotional distress, substance) as outcomes. Addressing these limitations is the answer to laying the foundation for a more trauma-informed, culturally-competent, and clinically useful risk assessment process to emerge for vulnerable adolescents involved in the juvenile justice system. The proposed study seeks to address these aims via a novel, mixed method research approach. In the first phase of the study, we will conduct qualitative interviews to determine how adolescents and caregivers involved with the juvenile justice system perceive the pathways for risk and resilience for overarching behavioral and emotional health. An emphasis of these interviews is to understand (a) what ACEs are most salient to juvenile justice-involved adolescents’ well-being, (b) which mechanisms explain the link between ACEs and mental health, and (c) who is most sensitive to ACEs. For the second study aim, we will conduct secondary data analyses to determine which risks and strengths assessed in current risk assessments mediate and/or moderate the relation between trauma-exposure and maladaptive outcomes and how well these risks and strengths classify individuals who are more likely to engage in violence perpetration, substance use, and/or experience emotional distress in the future. Novel analytic strategies are used to examine how robust these models are across intersecting identities. The third aim seeks to synthetize the findings from our two methodological paradigms to examine how community-based, emic perspectives on juvenile risk converge and diverge with validated facets of a scientific, etic model of risk currently utilized by the juvenile justice system. Collective findings will serve as the foundation for a randomized controlled trial (RCT) that tests if as assessment protocol based on the indices identified in our study leads to a more precise and engaging assessment and referral process for juvenile justice-involved adolescents, as well as prospective longitudinal research that seeks to quantify findings unique to our qualitative study.