A study of serious adolescent offenders as they transition to adulthood and out of crime

Community Based Services

Description

Specific Information: Community Based Services

Self-reported participation in sanctions and interventions involves an assessment of both residential and community-based social services. This information is obtained using a modified version of the Child and Adolescent Services Assessment (CASA) (Burns et al. 1992). The CASA was designed to assess the use of mental health and social services via self-report from youth age 8 to 18 and their parents. It explores services in both the justice (juvenile and adult systems) and mental health sectors.

Participants are asked if they received any of seven types of services for drug, alcohol or other behavioral or emotional problems while in the community: 1) individual treatment; 2) group services; 3) in-home services; 4) partial hospitalization/day program; 5) school-based services; 6) job training or job placement; or 7) case management. Definitions and examples of these services were provided to the participant at the time of the interview.

Specific information is obtained for each community-based service endorsed, including:

• For each month of the recall period: we record the frequency of receiving each service, focus (for drug or alcohol treatment, or for anger management or social skills training), and circumstances (whether the service was court-ordered, whether the youth attended alone or with family); whether the subject received any services in the month, the total number of different services received, and the total number of sessions across all services.
• At the recall level: information rating the helpfulness of each community-based service is obtained. In addition, the total number of sessions for each community-based service endorsed; the total number of sessions across all types of services endorsed; the number of different types of community-based services received in the recall period; whether each service was received specifically for drug or alcohol treatment in any month; whether each service was received specifically for anger management or social skills training in any month; whether the subject went with their family in any month; whether the service was court-ordered in any month; whether any mental health treatment services were received (combining five individual community based services); whether any substance use treatment was received (combining six individual community based services); and whether any competency based services were received (combining seven individual community based services).

A more detailed list of the information available in these calendars appears below.

Additional sections related to this calendar

Other sections of the Sanctions and Interventions calendar offer variables that supplement the information contained herein (see "Calendar Data/Sanctions and Interventions" for additional codebook sections). Specifically:

• Out of Community Placements. Information regarding residential services received over the recall period. Specifically, whether the youth had an overnight stay in ten different types of placements; the length of stay; characteristics of each institution and specific services received during their stay.
• Court monitoring services. Information regarding four types of court monitoring services, including probation/parole, community intensive supervision, drug court programs, and court-ordered groups.
• Contacts with the justice system. Information regarding five different types of contact with the legal system, including whether the youth was picked up by the police, arrested and charged, had a court appearance, received a summons, or received police or court assistance as the victim of a crime.
• Medication. Information regarding prescription medication the subject has taken for emotional and/or behavioral problems, as well as information regarding medication compliance.
• Official Court Record Information. Information regarding arrests and court involvement, including a monthly plotting of arrests based on official record information. This can be found under "Codebook -- Official Court Record Information".

Be sure to review the descriptions for each of these codebook sections in order to obtain a complete understanding of the information that we have available regarding sanctions and interventions.

Validity of self-report services data

As noted in Mulvey, Schubert and Chung (2007), we have confidence in the accuracy of the self-reported service data for two reasons. First, test-re-test reliability conducted by the authors of the CASA found very high reliability for reports of outpatient services (kappa = .8) and a moderate to high range of reliability (kappa = .6 to 1.0) for inpatient, out-of-home, and juvenile justice services (Ascher et al. 1996; Farmer et al. 1994) Our approach mirrors that used by these investigators, and we would expect our reliabilities to be about the same as a result.

Second, using official records in one of the data collection sites (the ProDES system in Philadelphia), we found high agreement between this information and the self-report data regarding the occurrence and timing of the receipt of residential services. The ProDES information system is a well-established and longstanding cooperative effort between the Philadelphia Department of Human Services and the Crime and Justice Research Center to track service involvement for youth in the juvenile justice system (Jones, Harris, and Fader 1999). We compared the ProDES reports of service involvement over a two-year period to our reports in the Pathways study data set for the sample used here. Our self-reported stays in settings other than jail and detention facilities (these are not covered by the ProDES system) were corroborated 96% of the time in the ProDES system (n=521). Conversely, of the participants who overlapped across the two studies, 97% of the stays recorded in ProDES were also present in our self-report data (n=343). In addition, there was high agreement about the timing of residential facility stays. We found 97% agreement regarding the intake and discharge month if we allowed for a two-month discrepancy in the reports (n=175) and 90% agreement if we allowed for only a one-month discrepancy (n=175). Although we do not have access to parallel validation data for the Maricopa County site, it seems reasonable that these results would generalize to the reports of service use from that site as well.

Descriptive Information: Monthly Data Characterizing the Recall Period

As a standard practice, the specific calendar information will be accompanied by four variables which describe the recall period. This information is important for the user to consider when attempting to use data characterizing the recall period (e.g., measures) in conjunction with the monthly-level calendar data. In addition, this information is useful if the user is viewing events from a developmental perspective. These variables include:

• The actual number of days in each month that is represented in the calendar data.
• The calendar month and year mapped to the recall month (e.g., if S1M04 covers February 2003, the 'number of days' value for that month will be 28, and the calendar month associated with S1M04 will be 02/2003, "RealDate").
• The subject's age at each month of the recall period, available in two forms: 1) the subject's age truncated to a whole number, and 2) the age as a continuous variable. (The subject age at the time of the interview is available in the "Demographics" codebook, available under "Measures").
• A marker indicating whether each month of the recall period is a community or institution month, where an institution month is defined as a month where the subject spent eight or more days across the following type of out of community placements: drug/alcohol facility, psychiatric hospital or unit, jail or prison, detention, YDC or ADJC, contracted residential treatment (general), and contracted residential treatment (mental health). These setting types are described in detail in the "Out of Community Placements" codebook, available under "Calendars".

In addition, each dataset includes five variables which describe basic information related to the interview. These are explained in full detail in the "Interview Information" section under "Measures". These variables include the completion status of the interview, the date of the interview, version number in which the interview was conducted, the number of months in the recall period, and the number of days in the recall period.

General Information: Use of monthly life calendar data

Data regarding the participant's community based services is captured using a monthly life-calendar approach (Belli, 1998; Caspi, Moffitt, Thornton, & Freedman, 1996), where the research participant is provided with a visual calendar that contextualizes the recall of research data by anchoring information to salient events. Specifically, individuals are first asked to recount salient events which occurred in the recall period (e.g. birthdays, deaths) and this information remains visible to the participant as an anchor point for the timing of events in each of several life calendar domains. This approach thus creates an integrated view of activities in all of the domains examined, has firm roots in the science of how people remember events and life situations (Bradburn, Rips, and Shevell, 1987; Belli, 1998), and capitalizes on these processes to generate accounts of past events. On a practical level, it provides researchers with a richer set of data points. Instead of simply getting a summary measure of life changes over an extended recall period, the monthly life-calendar places these changes at specific points in time, opening up the possibility of examining sequences of events and potential causal mechanisms within individuals (Fals-Stewart, 2003; Mulvey, et al., 2006).

General Information: Conversion of data to linear months

The monthly Pathways data, in its raw form, is not suited for some kinds of analytic approaches (e.g., trajectory analysis). Each time point interview allows for a maximum of eight or 14 months in the recall period, depending on the follow-up wave (eight months was the maximum for time points 6-36 and 14 was the maximum for time points 48-84). This means that there is a corresponding variable in the dataset reflecting events occurring in each of those months through a maximum of 14 months (the outer limit of any of the possible months covered). If however, the recall period did not include the maximum number of months (as is most often the case), there will be variables with no data. For example, subject 1 has a recall period of five months for follow-up 12 so this means he/she will have data in five monthly variables but not in the remaining nine. Subject 2, has seven months in the recall period for follow-up 12 so he/she will have data in all but seven of the monthly variables. The recall length is set by programming code based on the current date in relationship to the date of the previous interview (see "Interview Information" under Measures for a more detailed description of how the length of the recall period is determined). However, the programming code did permit the interviewer to "reset" by hand the length of the recall period. This was done infrequently, but in some instances it created a situation where we obtained two reports of the same month. For example, follow-up 6 covered months January to June and the interviewer resets the follow-up 12 recall period to start with June (leading to two different reports for the month of June). A series of data cleaning decisions (described in the "Community Based Services Calendar Documentation") were implemented to correct these situations but we note them here because they are relevant to the conversion of the data to linear months.

The "linear months" data set-up corrects these two situations. The "linear months" data reformats the variables so that each variable is a sequential representation of life event data for each month of the research participant's life from the baseline interview forward. In this format, variables that were place-markers for months not covered in the recall period are eliminated and situations where there were two reports for the same month are corrected. Thus, "linear month 8" actually represents eight calendar months from the baseline and "linear month 16" is actually 16 months past the baseline interview.

A specific list of variables available in the linear format is provided below. Also provided is a "map" to link the linear month back to the recall period and month in which the information was originally collected. This is important to know when recall-level data is being used in conjunction with the monthly event calendar data.

Data Issues

• The follow06 through follow36 timepoints allow for a maximum of eight months in the recall period, while follow48 and later will have a maximum of 14. Note that while variables for months 9 through 14 are included in the datasets for follow06 through follow36, these are essentially place markers and in no instance will any case have data for these months until the follow48 period (see description above).
• The distinction between services received in the community versus an institutional setting was not made until version 01.08. The question text for the gate question into the community based services section in versions 01.05 through 01.07 was phrased as follows:

"Ask the following questions about each of the services listed, and check those services endorsed by the subject. In the past N months, have you ever (fill in item below) for a drug, alcohol or other behavioral or emotional problem, like being depressed or feeling out of control?"

In version 01.08, the question text was changed as follows:

"Ask about each of the services listed, and check all that apply. More detailed guidelines and examples for categorization are listed below. In the past N months, have you ever received any of the following services IN THE COMMUNITY (fill in item below) for a drug, alcohol or other behavioral or emotional problem, like being depressed or feeling out of control?"

Because the "in the community" qualification was not present in version 01.05 through 01.07, it is possible that the subject was reporting on services that were received in a residential facility. It is not possible to distinguish cases in which this was the case versus cases in which the service was truly received in the community, so data for all of these versions has been removed.

At the follow06 timepoint, 420 cases were completed with an interview version between 01.05 and 01.07; at the follow12 timepoint, there are 125 cases.

Beginning with follow18, all cases were completed with version 01.08 or later and therefore are not subject to the working issue.

• An error in the interview programming code made it possible for the subject to either skip the calendar completely, or to exit without fully completing the calendar. Cases with this issue are noted with a missing value code of -700 (Data missing: result of a programming error).
• Two items (Went to community based education groups/classes, and Performed court-ordered community service) were not directly asked in the interview. After completing the community based calendar and the court monitoring calendars (probation, community supervision, court-ordered groups and drug court groups), the participant is asked if they received any other type of service in the recall period, other than those already mentioned. If they have, they are asked to provide a text description of the type of contact. These descriptions were reviewed by staff at the coordinating center.

In this review, two community based services that appeared often in the text description was "education classes/groups" (such as parenting classes, life skills classes) and "court-ordered community service"; therefore, we added a variable for each service to capture those services for those cases. A 1 (Yes) value was inserted for those cases that listed either of these two services; for all other cases, a missing value code is inserted to indicate the service was not endorsed. It should be understood that because we did not systematically inquire about these two services, these variables may not accurately reflect the extent to which these services were used within our sample.

Because the "other services" text description is obtained only at the recall level, a plotting of the months in which these two services were received is not available.

Items available regarding community based services

For an overview and a detailed list of the questions included with this calendar please select the link(s). In addition to providing an overview of the "flow" of the calendar and a detailed listing of the questions, this document notes version issues (i.e. questions/variables that are only present for a sub-sample due to their later addition to the interview) and provides other information that is critical to using and interpreting the data correctly. The table below gives you an overview of issues related to each construct noted above and it also provides you with the page numbers within our detailed document that address each of these constructs. Please be sure to consider this information carefully before moving forward with your analysis.

Click here to download a detailed document in PDF format.

References

• Caspi, A., Moffitt, T., Thornton, A., Friedman, D., Amell, J., Harrington, H., et al. (1996). The Life History Calendar: A research and clinical assessment method for collecting retrospective event-history data. International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., US, 6(2), 101-114.
• Belli, R.F. (1998). The structure of autobiographical memory and the event history calendar: Potential improvements in the quality of retrospective reports in surveys. Memory, 6(4), 383-406.
• Burns, Barbara J., Adrian Angold, Kathryn Magruder-Habib, Elizabeth J. Costello, and M. K. Patrick. 1992. The Child and Adolescent Services Assessment (CASA). Durham, NC: Duke University Medical Center.
• Mulvey, E. P., Schubert, C. A., & Chung, H. L. (2007). Service use after court involvement in a sample of serious adolescent offenders. Children and Youth Services Review, 29, 518-544.

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