Contextualising Youth Justice Interventions: Making the Case for Realist Synthesis

Abstract

This article examines the problematic reductionism and decontextualising nature of hegemonic youth justice intervention evaluation and offers a way ahead for a realistic, context-sensitive approach to intervention evaluation in the youth justice field. It opens by considering how the development of risk-based youth justice interventions in England and Wales flowed from and fed into the modernisation and resultant partiality of the ‘evidence-base’, which shaped youth justice practice. It then moves to a critical review of the emergence and continued influence of risk-based interventions and the ‘What Works’ intervention evaluation framework in youth justice. In the closing discussion, this article envisages the potential of taking a realist approach to the evaluation of youth justice interventions to mitigate the limitations of current approaches to intervention selection and the evaluation of their ‘effectiveness’.

Searching for context: a review of “what works” reviews of interventions to prevent youth offending using the EMMIE Framework

“…The promise for evaluation in youth justice is that, rather than summating evidence from quasi/experimental studies to isolate the average effect sizes of interventions, realist approaches integrate both quantitative and qualitative evidence to explore how contextual features shape the mechanisms through which interventions produce their outcomes and how contextual features may impact upon intervention implementation. Consequently, the reductionist and decontextualising limitations of the 'What Works' approach and the responsibilising and adulterising excesses of the interventions approaches it facilitates and validates could be addressed through the use of Realist Synthesis to identify and synthesise a broader evidence-base for better understanding and addressing (in policy and practice) causal mechanisms and the role of context in youth offending and its prevention (Sutton et al, 2022). Realist Synthesis starts by prioritising the underlying programme theories/theories of change as the basis for evaluating intervention research literature (and is explicitly concerned with understanding how contextual features (e.g.…”

“…implementation differences) and the mechanisms of change activated during an intervention (cf. Sutton et al 2022). For example, context can be understood in realist terms as the relational and dynamic features that shape the mechanisms by which an intervention works 6 (Greenhalgh and Mazano 2021) -implying a potential alignment with Child First tenets of collaborative and participatory (relationship-based rather than risk-led) practice seeking to promote prosocial identity (as a key mechanism of change) and positive outcomes (Case and Browning 2021a).…”

“…As the 21st century began, the growing popularity of the McGuire Principles for practice and the 'What Works' framework for evaluating intervention effectiveness provided an ideal vehicle for risk management (e.g. early intervention targeting assessed risk factors), which became a popular model/strategy of youth justice across Anglophone countries, alongside the responsibilising and managerialist 'new youth justice' (Tompson, et al, 2020), which shaped the newly-constructed the Youth Justice System (YJS) of England and Wales (Case, 2022), with its primary aim to prevent youth re/offending. The 'What Works' promise of reducing recidivism through experiment-based treatment programmes 'rooted in criminological knowledge' and evaluated using 'rigorous science' (Cullen, 2005: 1) complemented neo-liberal and risk-based thinking, which was exponentially influencing the direction of youth justice policy from the late 1990s.…”

“…(Greenhalgh and Manzano, 2021). Consequently, whilst context has been acknowledged as crucial to effectively evaluating mechanisms or causality in intervention success (see also Adler et al, 2016 for the Ministry of Justice (MOJ)), the construction and operationalisation of evaluation embedded within YJB and MOJ guidance remains reductionist and, ironically, largely decontextualised (Sutton et al, 2022). Even the increasingly popular 'What Works' Centres (e.g.…”

Reflections from Research Practice

“…In contrast to the above, an exemplar 'closed system' is in those conditions prized by the ideals of high-quality lab research, in which changes in that which is studied (e.g., samples and materials, or psychological responses of individuals) are typically highly controlled, regulated, and limited ideally only to the potential differences (pre)defined in measurements of the main independent and dependent variables. Some realists see such 'closed system' conditions of the lab, or intellectual tendencies relating to the devaluation of learning from contexts and circumstances of life outside of the laboratory/quasi-experiments, very much as an implementation of Hume's constant conjunction theory of causation (Bhaskar, 2008;Mingers & Standing, 2017;Kaidesoja, 2013;Sutton et al, 2022). Of course our knowledge of changes in the underlying 'essence' of Mechanisms as manifested in laboratory or everyday life (as above) could be quite imperfect, in light of the realist-constructivist idea of the eminently fallible nature of what we think we know from the Empirical domain (because of, e.g., the Platonic inclination taken forward particularly in critical realist literature -in the existence of entities of significance to the empirical in some meta-physical/'transcendental' reality).…”