Multisystemic Treatment of Antisocial Adolescents in Norway: Replication of Clinical Outcomes Outside of the US

Abstract

Background: MST is an intensive home-and community-based intervention for youths with serious antisocial behaviour and other serious clinical problems, which has been effective at reducing out-of-home placements and producing favourable long-term clinical outcomes in the US. The aims of the study were to determine the degree to which these outcomes would be replicated in Norway for youths with serious behaviour problems and to conduct a randomised trial of MST by an independent team of investigators. Method: Participants were 100 seriously antisocial youths in Norway who were randomly assigned to Multisystemic Therapy (MST) or usual Child Welfare Services (CS) treatment conditions. Data were gathered from youths, parents, and teachers pre-and post-treatment. Results: MST was more effective than CS at reducing youth internalising and externalising behaviours and out-of-home placements, as well as increasing youth social competence and family satisfaction with treatment. Discussion: This is the first study of MST outside of the US and one of the first not conducted by the developers of MST. The findings replicate those obtained by MST's developers and demonstrate the generalisability of short-term MST effects beyond the US.

The International Implementation of Multisystemic Therapy

“…This program expansion facilitated the conduct of RCTs outside the United States. Completed randomized trials in Norway (Ogden & Halliday-Boykins, 2004) and Canada (Leschied & Cunningham, 2002) generally show that at posttreatment, youth randomized to MST demonstrated a greater decrease in both internalizing and externalizing behavior problems, self-reported criminal activity, self-reported antisocial beliefs and attitudes, and frequency and length of stays in out-of-home placements than youth receiving usual services. Long-term outcomes from Norway indicated that at 2 years postintake, youth who received MST continued to demonstrate significantly reduced time in out-of-home placement, parent report of internalizing problems, youth report of delinquency, and teacher report of both internalizing and externalizing behavior problems compared to youth in the control group (Ogden & Hagen, 2006).…”

Crime Prevention: The Role of Individual Resilience within the Family

“…MST workers operate within a team structure and have small caseloads; they are available to their clients 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (Littell, 2005). MST is often used (and has been successful) with recidivist youth offenders and this treatment involves strengthening family relationships, communication, and processes (Ogden & Halliday-Boykins, 2004). Strengthening family relationships is an important issue across a variety of social issues including mental health (Clark, 2001;Falloon, 2003); and the maltreatment of children (Sar, Antle, Beldsoe, Barbee & Can Zyl, 2010) which, if not treated, can lead to mental health issues and antisocial/ criminal behaviour (Bender, 2010).…”

Implementing randomized experiments in criminal justice settings: An evaluation of multi-systemic therapy in the Netherlands

“…Ogden and Halliday-Boykins 2004;Huey et al 2000;Borduin et al 1995). Recently conducted meta-analyses of the effectiveness of MST (Curtis et al 2004), including 11 studies and 708 participants, showed a moderate effect size (d= 0.50) on indicators of criminal activity.…”

“…A recently published review by Littell (2005) has questioned the conclusion that MST is effective by pointing out that inconsistent and incomplete reports have been published, which sometimes contained unclear randomization procedures and inadequate analyses. Also, with a few exceptions (Leschied and Cunningham 2002;Ogden and Halliday-Boykins 2004;Timmons-Mitchell et al 2006), most of the empirical support, including the meta-analysis by Curtis et al (2004), comes from the studies conducted by the same group of researchers who also developed and implemented MST. A meta-analysis conducted by Littell et al (2005) showed much less promising results.…”