The YJB has commissioned a major study of the delivery and outcomes of prevention programmes provided by the youth justice system. This important research will be used to inform the development of future policy and practice for prevention and early intervention.
The Prevention Cohort Study (PCS) will document the experience of the sample of children and young people, their parents and case workers and their attitudes to the operation of the prevention programmes. In addition it documents the offending and related outcomes of participants set within the context of other prevention activities being delivered within their local areas.
The main objective of this study is to explore the relationship between elements of practice and outcomes across YJB prevention programmes. Four prevention programmes are covered in this study, namely Youth Inclusion Programmes (YIPs), Youth Inclusion and Support Panels (YISPs), parenting programmes and Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) and Individual Support Orders (ISOs) where they are found in conjunction with ASBOs.
Background to the research
One of the most effective ways to reduce youth crime is to prevent young people from getting into trouble in the first place. Therefore, the YJB’s prevention strategy is a key part of our work which has developed and funded a range of early intervention and diversionary schemes that tackle the underlying problems that exist in a young person’s life, which may lead them to commit crime or anti-social behaviour. Over the last few years, the YJB has undertaken several individual evaluations of prevention programmes, including YIPs, ASBOs and the Safer Schools Partnership (SSP) evaluation.
Now that the various prevention programmes have been in operation for several years, and the quality of management information that they hold has been tested and improved as part of other evaluations, it was considered the appropriate time to undertake an evaluation of the YJB’s entire prevention strategy and attempt to explore how effective the different programmes of intervention are in terms of practice and whether there is any cumulative effective of the different forms of prevention interventions young people may be receiving.
The prevention programmes all have different aims, participants and outcomes. The prevention study will therefore aim to explore the associations and relationships between young people, assessment, interventions received and their outcomes. This will enable some tentative comparison to be made across programmes.
Aims of the research
The PCS aims to provide answers to the following questions.
The key research questions for the study will be:
- What are the characteristics of young people on the programmes and how are they identified?
- What types of contact time and/or interventions do young people targeted as part of YJB prevention programmes receive?
- How well are these matched to their identified needs in Onset?
- How strongly are the interventions and/or contact time associated with arrest/(re)conviction and other desired outcomes, such as reduction in dynamic risk scores and engagement in education, training and employment?
- What are young people’s experiences of the prevention interventions?
- What is the relative cost effectiveness of each of the types of programme?
How the research is being carried out
The study is being carried out by staff at the Centre for Criminal Justice Economics and Psychology [opens in new window], at the University of York. The first year of the sample has involved the participation of a purposive sample of eight youth offending teams (YOTs) and focused in particular on a sample of approximately 1,900 young people.
The majority of data required for the study, as with the Juvenile Cohort Study, will be information that should already be recorded as part of everyday YOT practice (e.g. Onset, details of interventions delivered, referral procedures), which is being collected via existing case management systems. Conviction and reconviction analyses will also be conducted as part of the study.
Additionally, a smaller qualitative study will be conducted to identify the attitudes of stakeholders. This will include interviews with children and young people, their parents or carers and case workers. A sample of children and young people who started on a prevention programme in 2007/08 will be interviewed within the first few weeks of their involvement. The sample will be re-interviewed twelve months later with a view to establishing what has happened to them in the meantime and whether they have changed their attitudes towards the prevention work they experienced.
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 at–risk young people who typically receive prevention programmes (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 engagement with these programmes, and subsequent changes in their needs and patterns of reoffending.
The results of the PCS 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 young people who receive interventions as they are delivered in regular day-to-day operating conditions.