There remains a critical need for continued innovation and evaluation in that aspect of the mental health field concerned with adolescents with antisocial and violent behavior. Since 1967, the Achievement Place Research Project has been developing and evaluating an intervention approach (the Teaching-Family model) for the treatment of such adolescents within group-home settings. The approach has been disseminated to over 200 group homes across the country, each associated with one of several training sites that use the staff-training and quality-control procedures developed by the project. There has been no adequate overall appraisal of the effectiveness of the approach as applied across the replication training sites, nor any systematic appraisal of the approach in campus-based (as opposed to open-community-based) settings. Having such appraisals would be of value both to potential adopters, who need to make informed decisions, and to approach developers, who need information on the value of extant within-and across-site dissemination and quality-control strategies. This study would evaluate the effectiveness of the Teaching-Family model on a nationwide scale at a number of levels: 1) It would examine the effectiveness of Teaching-Family sites and homes in producing important outcomes for youths (e.g., decreased delinquency, improved prosocial behavior, skills, and academic performance). This examination will invole community-based and campus-based programs. In both cases Teaching-Family programs would be compared to matched comparisons programs in the same region. 2) It would assess whether the Teaching-Family approach as applied across sites is associated with relatively desireable program-level outcomes (i.e., higher outside-consumer satisfaction, lower operating costs). 3) It would examine the extent to which sites have adequately implemented the model's prescribed treatment, staff-training, and quality-control elements; and assess the association between the extent and quality of these elements and youths' outcomes. 4) It would test the hypothesis that Teaching-Family and comparison homes differ on theoretically-relevant treatment elements; and it would test relationships postulated in a learning theory between behavioral influences and illegal behavior across the times and settings represented by pre-, during-, and post-treatment periods.
