An Ecological Model for Intervention for Juvenile Justice-Involved Girls

Highlights• Partners engaged in an intentional process of relationship building to build a strong sense of trust.• Engaging staff who bridged organizational and practice contexts was key for intervention development.• Identifying, and building on, the strengths of the paraprofessional workforce was a primary focus.• Ensuring all stakeholders provided input into the development of the service model was vital.• Creating mechanisms for communication across multiple levels of the organization was critical.Abstract This paper describes the process of a community-academic partnership to navigate implementation challenges for a school-based service model led by paraprofessionals to promote positive parenting in high poverty urban communities. We describe the process by which we (a) identified implementation challenges, (b) sustained a university-community collaboration to redesign the paraprofessional service model, and (c) assessed the feasibility of the new model involving four social service agencies in 16 schools with over 600 families. The structure and process of the collaboration and refinement are described with attention to who was best positioned to engage in the collaboration and how the partnership worked to balance scientific rigor with responsiveness to paraprofessional workforce strengths. Feasibility data indicated that the revised model was successfully implemented by paraprofessional staff; 92.2% of possible staff monthly reports were completed and discussion of key goals was incorporated into 94.2% of interactions. Continual monitoring provided critical feedback from stakeholders as we drew on and interpreted these various sources of information to build and refine the service model. We suggest that these processes are critical steps to bridge the research-to-practice gap, by promoting practices that are aligned with the needs of children and families, and the staff who serve them.

Section: Defining a Collaborative Processmentioning

confidence: 99%

Collaboration with Urban Community Stakeholders: Refining Paraprofessional‐led Services to Promote Positive Parenting

Mehta

Lakind

Rusch

et al. 2019

“…Our findings indicate that boys have greater gains in group interventions as compared to girls. Further research and evaluative work in this area should examine the inclusion of gender‐responsive characteristics in DBP‐related interventions such as trauma‐informed care to address victimization histories and focusing on relational contexts such as girls’ families, peer groups, and romantic partners (e.g., Anderson et al., ; Javdani & Allen, ). This is an especially pressing area of inquiry given the over‐focus of DBP interventions on the needs and outcomes of boys.…”

Section: Directions For Future Research and Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Indeed, a growing literature underscores gender‐specific risk and protective factors associated with girls’ DBP (Javdani, Sadeh, & Verona, , ; Leve, Chamberlain, & Kim, ) and suggests differential impact of DBP programming on girls’ outcomes (Chesney‐Lind, Morash, & Stevens, ; Zahn, Day, Mihalic, & Tichavsky, ). However, despite girls’ different constellations of risk, the majority of review and meta‐analytic studies on DBP do not examine the possibility that treatment impact may vary for boys versus girls (Anderson et al., ; Javdani & Allen, ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Meta‐Analysis of Program Characteristics for Youth with Disruptive Behavior Problems: The Moderating Role of Program Format and Youth Gender

Granski

Javdani

Anderson

et al. 2019

Self Cite

There is high variability in efficacy for interventions for youth with disruptive behavior problems (DBP). Despite evidence of the unique correlates and critical consequences of girls’ DBP, there is a dearth of research examining treatment efficacy for girls. This meta‐analysis of 167 unique effect sizes from 29 studies (28,483 youth, 50% female; median age: 14) suggests that existing treatments have a medium positive effect on DBP (g = .33). For both boys and girls, the most effective interventions included (a) multimodal or group format, (b) cognitive skills or family systems interventions, and (c) length‐intensive programs for (d) younger children. Boys demonstrated significantly greater treatment gains from group format interventions compared to girls, which is particularly important given that the group program format was the most prevalent format for boys and girls, with 14 studies involving 10,433 youth encompassing this category. This is the first meta‐analysis to examine the effect of program characteristics in a sample of programs selected to be specifically inclusive of girls. Given that girls are underrepresented in intervention research on DBP, findings are discussed in terms of gender‐responsive considerations and elucidating how key aspects of program structure can support more effective intervention outcomes for youth.

“…The ROSES study is a 2.5 year community‐university partnership that simultaneously seeks to implement and evaluate the ROSES intervention—a 12 week, free, rights‐based, gender responsive, community‐based advocacy program for 11–17 year old girls pushed into the juvenile crime processing system (see Javdani & Allen, for program description). As a randomized control trial, longitudinal study, ROSES aims to enroll 300 legal system‐involved girls and one caretaker onto the project.…”

Section: Our Praxismentioning

confidence: 99%

The Praxis of Decoloniality in Researcher Training and Community‐Based Data Collection

Singh

Granski

Victoria

et al. 2018

Self Cite

In this paper, we detail our praxis of decoloniality in the context of a community‐based study that employs a quantitative experimental methodology to evaluate an intervention for girls involved in the juvenile legal system. We resist the essentializing of methodology that positions quantitative paradigms as impermeable to reflexivity and decoloniality, and describe a model for training and supervising researchers engaged in an experimental randomized controlled trial of an advocacy program for girls, most of whom are girls of color and about half of whom identify as LGBT. In this way, we consider researcher training as a critical teaching context and describe the ways in which our training, community‐based data collection, and supervision structure are anchored in de/anti/post colonial and indigenous scholarships. Specifically, our praxis is centered on conducting research as a site of resistance to hegemony, and practicing a critical compassion rooted in remembering complex personhoods. We further discuss the boundaries and limitations of our own epistemic power in relation to two central questions: how can researchers influence how knowledge is produced? How can researchers influence how knowledge producers are themselves produced?