Abstract
Background: Youth under juvenile justice (JJ) supervision are at high-risk of adverse outcomes from substance use, making prevention important. Few studies have examined prevention-related attitudes of JJ employees, yet such attitudes may be important for implementing prevention programs. Attitudes toward prevention may reflect individual characteristics and organizational contexts.
Methods: Mixed effects regression was used to analyze data from 492 employees in 36 sites participating in the Juvenile Justice-Translational Research on Interventions for Adolescents in the Legal System (JJ-TRIALS) cooperative agreement. JJ employees' perceived importance of substance use prevention was measured. Staff-level variables included attitudes, job type, and demographic characteristics. Site-level variables focused on use of evidence-based screening tools, prevention programs, and drug testing.
Results: On average, JJ employees rated substance use prevention as highly important (mean = 45.9, out of 50). JJ employees generally agreed that preventing substance use was part of their agency's responsibility (mean = 3.8 on scale ranging from 1 to 5). At the site level, 72.2% used an evidence-based screening tool, 22.2% used one or more evidence-based prevention program, and 47.2% used drug testing. Reported importance of prevention was positively associated with site-level use of screening tools and drug testing as well as staff-level attitudes regarding prevention being consistent with the agency's mission.
Conclusions: The associations between screening and prevention attitudes suggest that commitment to identifying youth needs may result in greater openness to preventing substance use. Future efforts to implement substance use prevention within JJ agencies charged with supervising youth in the community may benefit from highlighting the fit between prevention and the agency's mission.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
5-15-2018
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.1186/s40352-018-0070-9
Funding Information
This study was funded under the Juvenile Justice Translational Research on Interventions for Adolescents in the Legal System project (JJ-TRIALS) cooperative agreement, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), National Institutes of Health (NIH). The authors gratefully acknowledge the collaborative contributions of NIDA and support from the following grant awards: Chestnut Health Systems (U01DA036221); Columbia University (U01DA036226); Emory University (U01DA036233); Mississippi State University (U01DA036176); Temple University (U01DA036225); Texas Christian University (U01DA036224); and University of Kentucky (U01DA036158).
Repository Citation
Sales, Jessica M.; Wasserman, Gail; Elkington, Katherine S.; Lehman, Wayne; Gardner, Sheena; McReynolds, Larkin; Wiley, Tisha; and Knudsen, Hannah K., "Perceived Importance of Substance Use Prevention in Juvenile Justice: A Multi-Level Analysis" (2018). Behavioral Science Faculty Publications. 32.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/behavsci_facpub/32
Included in
Behavior and Behavior Mechanisms Commons, Community Health Commons, Substance Abuse and Addiction Commons
Notes/Citation Information
Published in Health and Justice, v. 6, 12, p. 1-9.
© The Author(s). 2018
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.