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The impact of trauma on children and youth has potentially serious and long-lasting negative consequences, including increased involvement in the juvenile and criminal justice systems. The objective of this study was to meta-analyze research on the effectiveness of trauma-informed treatment programs for justice-involved youth and youth at risk of justice system involvement who have experienced some form of trauma. Our systematic search identified 29 publications that met our eligibility criteria and represent 30 treatment–comparison contrasts. Six of these evaluated the effectiveness of trauma-informed programs for justice-involved youth, and the remaining 24 evaluated programs for at-risk children and youth. The findings suggest that cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), including trauma-focused CBT, is effective. In addition, there was weak evidence suggesting that programs that used a cognitive restructuring component or had the participant create a trauma narrative were slightly more effective than programs without these features. Additional high-quality randomized controlled trials are needed.

Research summary: Restorative justice (RJ) in practice has taken on many different forms. It is argued that RJ does not have definitional boundaries, making it hard to limit its essence to that of a particular program, practice, philosophy, or outcome. Therefore, this study's objective was to systematically review and statistically synthesize all available research on RJ programs and related programs and practices using meta-analytic methods. Our updated systematic search and metaanalysis identified a total of 57 unique studies including 79 evaluations (including 18 random assignment and 61 quasi-experimental designs). We extracted a total of 631 effect sizes related to delinquency, non-delinquency, and victim outcomes. The results of our meta-analysis showed that RJ programs and practices are associated with a small-to-moderate and statistically significant reduction in future delinquent behavior relative to more traditional juvenile justice responses (g = 0.23, 95% CI [0.14, 0.32]). Nevertheless, results were smaller for the more rigorous random assignment studies and nonsignificant, raising concerns about the robustness of thisThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

A diversity of approaches for critically appraising qualitative and quantitative evidence exist and emphasize different aspects. These approaches lack clear processes to facilitate rating the overall quality of the evidence for aggregated findings that combine qualitative and quantitative evidence. We draw on a meta‐aggregation of implementation and process evaluations to illustrate a method for critically appraising empirical findings generated from qualitative and quantitative studies. This method includes a rubric for standardizing assessments of the overall quality of evidence in an evidence synthesis or mixed‐method systematic review. The method first assesses the credibility of each finding extracted from a study. These individual assessments then feed into an overall score for any synthesized finding generated from the meta‐aggregation. We argue that this approach provides a balanced and inclusive method of critical appraisal by first assessing individual findings, rather than studies, using flexible criteria applicable to a range of primary study methods to derive an overall assessment of synthesized findings.