This article summarizes the results from a systematic literature review of the published research on youth well-being in the child welfare, juvenile justice, education, and public health systems. The review identifies areas to address among researchers and practitioners in order to create a coherent and coordinated approach for improving youth well-being across child-serving systems. Although each of these separate systems all serve youth populations, the results suggest that each system (and the research field that supports it) differ with one another to a large degree on how to (a) operationalize well-being, (b) support its development, (c) measure its presence, and (d) train the workforce to sustain outcomes over time. Implications for research and practice are discussed. IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE• Social systems designed to support youth do not share a common way of defining, reinforcing, assessing, or training their workforce to promote youth well-being.• There is a need for systems to work together in sharing data, crosstraining staff, and using a unified approach for advancing the best interests of youth in care.• Research on resiliency and related internal well-being supports should be tied to research on permanency or competency development and related external wellbeing supports.
Research suggests that the essential needs of many people in the United States and around the world are not being met by the current services being provided. Indicators such as limited access to prevention and interventions for preventable diseases, low graduation rates, and high unemployment and incarceration rates provide evidence of these unmet needs (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2013; World Bank, 2014). For example, in 2011, only about 35 percent of adults in the United States with serious mental impairment received treatment during the past year, and not all of these services were appropriate (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2013). Internationally, this "treatment" gap (e.g., the difference between the number of people diagnosed and the number receiving treatment) is estimated to reach about 76% to 85% in low-and middle-income countries (World Health Organization, 2014). Other unmet needs range from lack of access to health care, inadequate housing, and limited education and workforce opportunities (Kena et al., 2014;Merikangas et al., 2011; Trading Economics, n.d.).Adding additional complexity to this issue is the fact that how well human needs are being met varies significantly for different populations. Data consistently indicate that individuals, families, and communities that have experienced social and economic disadvantage face greater obstacles to optimal health (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2011; World Health Organization, 2014). Factors such as race or ethnicity, religion, class, gender, age, mental health or substance use disorders, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, geographic location, country of origin, and involvement in juvenile justice or child welfare settings have been historically linked to health disparities (Abram, Paskar, Washburn, & Teplin, 2008;Kataoka, Zhang, & Wells, 2002).Although the gap in service use is related to a multitude of factors including relevance of services, contextual fit, access (e.g., availability, cost of transportation, time of service), and stigma associated with receiving services, one approach to reducing the treatment gap is to address these different human needs by bringing interventions, programs, and practices to scale. There has also been a focus in the past several decades on how to address gaps between what is known from research studies conducted in controlled settings with defined samples of service recipients to what is done in practice settings (the research-topractice or science-to-service gap, Wandersman et al., 2008). Challenges in implementing interventions effectively in practice settings are an additional focus (the implementation gap; Fixsen & Blase, 2013).
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