Evidence-based skills in Welsh youth justice settings

Author(s):  
Pamela Ugwudike ◽  
Gemma Morgan

This chapter presents the findings of a study that examined supervision skills within three youth offending teams. The study focused on youth justice practice in Wales and its objective was to explore how best to integrate research evidence into frontline practice. It found that participating practitioners employed mainly relationship skills. This is a positive finding but there was limited use of evidence-based skills embedded in what is described as the ‘structuring principle' of effective interpersonal interactions (Bonta and Andrews 2017). The skills are change-focused and they impact on what young people learn during interactions with practitioners and the quality of the influence the practitioners exert over them. This chapter examines the factors that impede the application of structuring skills and concludes with a discussion of the ways in which gaps between research and supervision practice can be bridged to enhance the quality of youth justice practice.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fazwa M. Fadzilah ◽  
Noreen Izza Arshad ◽  
Izuddin Zainal-Abidin ◽  
Hui Min Low ◽  
Ahmad Kamil Mahmood ◽  
...  

BACKGROUND Mobile applications (apps) that offer a variety of techniques to improve stuttering have been flourishing in the digital marketplace. In evidence-based clinical practice, speech therapists will recommend audio-enriched mobile apps to individuals with stuttering problems based on empirical research evidence. Unfortunately, many stuttering mobile apps available in the market are developed without a substantial research base. Hence, speech therapists necessitate a guideline which they could use to assess the quality of a stuttering mobile app before recommending the app to stutterers. OBJECTIVE The objective of this study is to develop a rubric for assessing the quality of the stuttering mobile app in assisting speech therapists to make informed recommendations METHODS The rubric was initially developed based on a set of criteria reviewed from the literature. Online surveys and focused group discussion were then conducted for results verification. RESULTS The outcome of this study is a rubric designed with four categories and 18-evaluative dimensions tailored to analyze the quality of stuttering mobile apps. The stuttering mobile app assessment rubric presented in the serve multiple purposes, including an evaluation instrument, providing guidelines for developing stuttering mobile apps and for creating a standard form that can be shared with professionals to facilitate a collective effort. CONCLUSIONS This rubric also offers a guidance to steer drive the future development of stuttering mobile apps that are evidence-based, and theoretically grounded


2004 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stewart Einfeld ◽  
Margaret Tobin ◽  
John Beard ◽  
Elizabeth Evans ◽  
Richard Buss ◽  
...  

Stewart Einfeld is at the School of Psychiatry, University of New South Wales; the late Margaret Tobin was the Director of Mental Health, South Australia; John Beard is Head of the Northern Rivers University Department of Rural Health, University of Sydney; Elizabeth Evans is a Research Assistant at the School of Psychiatry, University of New South Wales; Richard Buss is the Area Manager, Northern Rivers Area Mental Health Service; Michael Dudley is a child psychiatrist at Prince of Wales Hospital and the School of Psychiatry, University of New South Wales.This report is dedicated to our late co-author Margaret Tobin, to honour her contribution to advancing the quality of mental health services.Objective: In 1998 and 1999, two NSW Area Health Services conducted the Youth At Risk of Deliberate Self Harm (YARDS) project. The YARDS project was designed to implement evidence-based service enhancements for the clinical management of young people with Deliberate Self Harm. This paper examines the extent to which service enhancements implemented during YARDS were maintained 4 years after the conclusion of the project and compares service quality with another NSW Area Health Service that did not participate in the YARDS project.Method: Staff from mental health services and emergency departments completed the Service Activity Scale, a measure developed for the YARDS project to assess the quality of health service response to individuals who present following a suicide attempt.Results: Results indicated that the service improvements made during the YARDS project were maintained 4years after the project ended. Furthermore, a significant difference was found between scores for services that participated in YARDS and services that did not participate in YARDS.Conclusions: These results suggest that projects such as YARDS which support evidence based service nhancements may be useful in improving the management of young people with deliberate self-harm, and that these improvements may be long-lasting.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 1735
Author(s):  
Stephen Case

The generation of empirical evidence to explain offending by children and young people has been a central driver of criminological and sociological research for more than two centuries. Across the international field of youth justice, empirical research evidence has become an integral means of complementing and extending the knowledge and understanding of offending offered by the official enquiries and data collection of professional stakeholders and an essential tool for informing ‘evidence-based’ policy, practice and ‘effective intervention’. However, it will be argued that the hegemonic empirical evidence-base created by youth justice research over the past two decades has been generated through methodological reductionism - the oversimplification of complexity, the restriction of conceptual lens and the relative exclusion of competing explanatory paradigms and empirical methodologies, which in turn, has reduced the scope and validity of the policy and practice recommendations derived from it.


Youth Justice ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 147322542094159
Author(s):  
Hannah Smithson ◽  
Paul Gray ◽  
Anna Jones

This article presents the findings from a pioneering project between a university and 10 regional youth justice services. The project resulted in the co-production, with young people, of a framework of principles termed ‘Participatory Youth Practice’ (PYP). The benefits and challenges of producing PYP are discussed. We argue that the framework – grounded in Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and ‘child first, offender second’ principles – is a formative step in the process of creating a youth justice system that respects and acknowledges children and young people’s rights and enables them to meaningfully participate in decision-making processes.


2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-253 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela Ugwudike ◽  
Gemma Morgan

Although the Risk, Need, Responsivity model of rehabilitation is rooted in a substantial body of research evidence, several studies of the model’s efficacy in youth and adult justice settings within England and Wales have revealed modest outcomes. In this article, we contend that the findings do not necessarily reflect deficits in the model. Rather, a growing corpus of research now indicates that poor practice integrity or inadequate implementation of the model’s principles is a key but under-researched factor that undermines the efficacy of interventions based on the model. We also present the findings of a study that explored applications of the model in three Welsh youth justice services and we examine possible means of bridging the gap between research evidence and real-world practice.


Author(s):  
Paul P. Glasziou

You must always be students, learning and unlearning till your life’s end. Joseph Lister Neither our memories nor our textbooks are complete and up to date with all the research relevant to the patients we will see today. The scattering of necessary research across a vast ocean of literature makes it inaccessible at the point of clinical decision. The consequences for patient care have given rise to the discipline of evidence-based medicine (EBM), whose two central concerns are with the quality of research evidence and with its appropriate usage in clinical care....


2017 ◽  
Vol 102 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beng Huat See

With the push for evidence-informed policy and practice, schools and policy makers are now increasingly encouraged and supported to use and enagage with research evidence. This means that consumers of research will now need to be discerning in judging the quality of research evidence that will inform their decisions. This paper evaluates the quality of evidence behind some well-known education programmes using examples from previous reviews of over 5,000 studies on a range of topics. It shows that much of the evidence is weak, and fundamental flaws in research are not uncommon. This is a serious problem if teaching practices and important policy decisions are made based on such flawed evidence. Lives may be damaged and opportunities missed. The aim of this paper is to show how widespread this problem is and to suggest ways by which the quality of education research may be improved. For example, funders of research and research bodies need to insist on quality research and fund only those that meet the minimum quality criteria. Journal editors and reviewers need to be cognizant of fundamental flaws in research and reject such submissions. One way to do this is to encourage submission of the research design and research protocol prior to acceptance, so acceptance or rejection is based on the design and not on the outcomes. This helps prevent publication bias and biased reporting. Individual researchers can improve quality by making it their moral responsibility to be truthful and transparent.


2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (5) ◽  
pp. 554-571 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Smith ◽  
Patricia Gray

This article reports on a two-year investigation, which maps out contemporary approaches to the delivery of youth justice in England, in light of substantial recent changes in this area of practice. The findings are derived from a detailed examination of youth offending plans and a series of corroborative semi-structured interviews with managers and practitioners from selected youth offending services. Our inquiry has enabled us to develop a detailed three-fold typology of youth justice agencies’ orientations towards practice, represented as ‘offender management’, ‘targeted intervention’ and ‘children and young people first’; as well as a small number of ‘outliers’ where priorities are articulated rather differently. Our findings enable us to reflect on this evidence to suggest that there are a number of ‘models’ of youth justice practice operating in parallel; and that there does not appear at present to be the kind of ‘orthodoxy’ in place which has sometimes prevailed in this field. We also raise doubts about previous representations of unified models of youth justice presumed to be operative at national or jurisdictional levels. We conclude with a number of further observations about the combined effect of current influences on the organization and realization of youth justice, including the growing emphasis on localized responsibility for delivery and increasingly complex expectations of the service context.


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