The YJB and the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) have recently commissioned a major new study to look at the delivery and impact of interventions provided by the youth justice system. This important research will be used to inform the development of future policy and practice for both the community and the secure estate.
The Juvenile Cohort Study (JCS) will investigate the characteristics and outcomes of the community and custodial interventions received by young people. It will also seek to identify relationships between elements of current practice and desired outcomes, measured both in terms of reconviction (including frequency and severity of reconviction) and also changes in risk factors. The same large and representative sample of young people will be followed for three years, as they undertake these interventions and afterwards.
Click for an update on what's been done during the first quarter of the study.
Background to the research
The JCS is one of four major cohort studies being commissioned by NOMS to track large groups of offenders at specific points in the criminal justice system. Until recently, evidence for the effectiveness of programmes intended to reduce reoffending has relied upon studies of individual interventions in isolation.
However, there has been increasing awareness that there are multiple factors that cause young people to offend. This was illustrated by the Social Exclusion Unit’s 2002 report Reducing Re-Offending by Ex-Prisoners (opens in new window) and more recently in Home Office Research Study 291 (opens in new window) published in 2005.
As a result, there has been increasing emphasis on the use of different approaches to address the range of offenders’ needs. This is intended to yield greater reductions in reoffending than tackling single risk factors alone. The importance of developing the evidence base on such multi-modal approaches is a key factor behind the current NOMS Business Plan and YJB research strategy.
Aims of the research
The JCS aims to provide answers to the following questions.
- What are the characteristics of young people starting a youth justice sentence, and what needs and protective factors do they have?
- What types of intervention and contact time do young people receive from YOTs?
- How well are the interventions that the cohort receives matched to their needs as identified via Asset?
- How strongly are interventions associated with reduction in risk scores (as measured by Asset) and rates of re offending, including seriousness and frequency?
- Which aspects of the interventions that young people receive do they and their case managers believe are most useful in addressing their offending behaviour? Why are these interventions considered useful? Are interventions delivered as reported in the administrative systems?
How the research is being carried out
The study is being carried out by consultants at Morgan Harris Burrows, working in association with staff from the Centre for Criminology at the University of Oxford. It will involve the participation of a random sample of 30 YOTs, and focus in particular on a random sample of 10,000 young people, who will be tracked over a two-year period.
Letters inviting teams to participate in the research have recently been sent to a number of YOTs and it is planned that data collection will begin during autumn 2007.
The majority of data required for the study will be information that should already be recorded as part of everyday YOT practice (e.g. Asset, details of interventions delivered, contact logs), which will be collected via the existing case management systems. In order to ensure that the data collected from the different YOTs is consistent, the research team will be working with practitioners in the early stages of the project to agree a set of common data-recording standards.
There will also be a small qualitative study – involving interviews with young people and practitioners – which will provide an insight into which aspects of youth justice interventions young people and YOT staff believe have most impact in terms of changing offending behaviour. This is particularly relevant to the fifth research question above and will complement the quantitative aspects of the study by providing a more detailed understanding of how young people experience the interventions delivered by YOTs.
Outcomes
While a cohort study does not measure the direct impact of interventions and cannot definitively answer ‘what works’, it will tell us a great deal about the characteristics of young people who typically receive interventions (including the mix of risks and needs), what combinations of interventions they receive, and which types of young people might benefit most from particular types of intervention.
In addition, because cohort studies follow the same subjects throughout, they allow us to examine young people’s progress through time – by investigating the range of interventions they receive during their sentences, and subsequent changes in their needs and patterns of reoffending.
The results of the JCS and the other cohort studies will be of particular value to practitioners and policy makers because they will describe the characteristics of and outcomes for offenders who receive interventions as they are delivered in regular day-to-day operating conditions.
Along with other evaluations of single interventions, this will contribute towards an evidence-based picture of what multi-modal packages might be most useful to reduce reoffending, as well as which individual interventions we should test further in the longer term.
There will also be other practical benefits. For example, it is anticipated that one of the supplementary lessons derived from the JCS will be how to apply more consistent data recording across the wider YOT estate.
The final report is planned for publication in 2010.