Order Beyond the Court: Exploring the Community Support Team Program Through Realist Evaluation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Since the inception of the Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA) in 2003, the number of youth entering the Canadian justice system has declined. This trend is in line with the YCJA’s key objectives to divert youth from the justice system through extrajudicial measures. There is limited evidence depicting the most appropriate ways in which community programs should address the youth justice cases being diverted to them. Further, there is no governing mandate to hold community programs accountable for the implementation of their programming, or evaluations to attribute success to their programs. The present study uses two primary theoretical frameworks—the Ecological Systems Theory and the Risk-Needs-Responsivity Model—to examine the mechanisms by which the program interventions operate and the extent to which they impact youth..\n\nMethods: This study relied on secondary data from a community-based diversion program aimed at building skills to deter youth offenders at medium- to high-risk from reoffending through a tailored, case management approach. A realist approach was employed to evaluate how individual and environmental factors influence various youth identity groups differently with regards to achieving the intended outcomes. Chi Square, T-tests, and ANOVA were used to examine the research questions of this study.\n\nResults and discussion: Following participation in the program, study participants demonstrated high levels of therapeutic alliance and slight improvements in their ecological systems, however youth with stronger therapeutic alliance experienced weaker ecological systems. Relationship-building skills acted as a potential mechanism supporting the presence of strong ecological systems and presence of strong therapeutic alliance. Exposure to trauma was related to high levels of both therapeutic alliance and a strong ecological system, potentially moderating this relationship. No relationship was found between youth engagement in program activities and improved lagging skills, nor did social, emotional or executive functioning skills appear to affect youth engagement. Parental responsiveness and emotional regulation appear to act as potential mechanisms impacting the relationship between program engagement improvements in lagging skills. Findings from this study highlight the complex relationship between exposure to trauma and outcomes and the importance of emotional regulation and relationship-building skills as mechanisms leading to positive outcomes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.026 | 0.030 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".