The development and expansion of group-home treatment has taken place with almost no information about what happens in adulthood to the youths who attend group-homes. Should society be concerned about these youths? Are they as a group in high risk of becoming adults that have high levels of criminal, violent, and antisocial behavior as well as personal problems such as alcohol and drug abuse? Or do the group-home youths eventually integrate into the social system and become indistinct from other young adults? This proposal consists of three studies. They are designed to examine the course of development during adolescence and young adulthood of a sample of seemingly highrisk youths who were commited for treatment to group homes because of their behavior problems.
The aims of the three studies respectively are: 1) To determine whether the behavior patterns of these youths will tend to merge and become indistinguishable from those of a normative sample during young adulthood. The normative sample will be tailor-made from the National Youth Survey data set. This tailor-made normative sample will consist of youths demographically comparable to the group-home sample. 2) To assess whether a treatment effect will be apparent for the Teaching-Family group-home approach during young adulthood. 3) To estimate what the group-home youths' behavior patterns would have been had they not received group-home treatment, by comparing the group home youths with two untreated comparison groups of youths who were originally similar to the group-home youths in demographic characteristics and deviant behavior but who did not receive group-home or residential treatment. The significance of these studies is that they may help mental health policy makers draw conclusions both about the long-term risk of group-home youths to society and about the impact of group-home treatment in general as well as the Teaching-Family approach in particular.
| Eyler, Lisa T; Prom-Wormley, Elizabeth; Fennema-Notestine, Christine et al. (2011) Genetic patterns of correlation among subcortical volumes in humans: results from a magnetic resonance imaging twin study. Hum Brain Mapp 32:641-53 |
