Juvenile crime is a serious problem for which no treatment approach has been found to be reliably effective. This outcome evaluation assessed during and posttreatment effectiveness of Teaching-Family group home treatment programs for juvenile offenders. The evaluation included the original Achievement Place program, which was the prototype for the development of the Teaching-Family treatment approach, 12 replications of Achievement Place, and 9 comparison group home programs. Primary dependent measures were retrieved from court and police files and included number of alleged offenses, percentage of youths involved in those alleged offenses, and percentage of youths institutionalized. Other dependent measures were subjective ratings of effectiveness obtained from the program consumers, including the group home residents. The results showed difference during treatment favoring the Teaching-Family programs on rate of alleged criminal offenses, percentage of youths involved in those offenses, and consumer ratings of the programs. The consumer ratings provided by the youths and their school teachers were found to be inversely and significantly correlated with the reduction of criminal offenses during treatment. There were no significant differences during treatment on measures of noncriminal offenses (e.g., truancy, runaway, and curfew violations). In the posttreatment year, none of the differences between the groups was significant on any of the outcome measures. The results are discussed in terms of measurement and design issues in the evaluation of delinquency treatment programs and in relation to the evaluation of Teaching-Family group homes by Richard Jones and his colleagues.

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This research sought to identify, train, and validate social behaviors preferred by youths to be used by youth-care personnel (called teaching-parents). With training, consistent increases in seven preferred behaviors were observed for the six teaching-parent trainees. These behaviors included offering to help, "getting to the point", giving reasons why a behavior is important to a youth, providing descriptions of alternative behaviors, positive feedback, smiling, and positive motivational incentives (i.e., points for task mastery exchanged for tangible reinforcers). Increases in these behaviors correlated with increases in the youths' ratings of the quality of the trainees' interactions. Posttraining levels of preferred social behavior and youth ratings for trainees also compared favorably with levels for successful professional teaching-parents. These results suggest that teaching-parents can be successfully trained to interact with youths in ways that are preferred by the youths.

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