GRAD Project DescriptionProject Name:The Assessment of Global Risk Indicators in the Lives of Court-Involved Adolescents and their Families Project Location:The Ohio State University, College of Human Ecology, 1787 Neil Avenue, Columbus, Ohio 43210 Description of ProjectOverview:The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) seeks to both “promote delinquency prevention and early intervention efforts that reduce the flow of juvenile offenders into the juvenile justice system” and “improve the juvenile justice system and the response of the system.” OJJDP’s Comprehensive Strategy for meeting these objectives emphasizes the use of assessment instruments for classifying juveniles into appropriate groups for the purposes of these prevention and intervention efforts. However, relatively few instruments with appropriate reliability and validity evidence are available for professionals working with adolescents who penetrate the juvenile justice system at any level. These professionals have the task of determining what must be done to provide supervision and/or treatment in order to prevent the juvenile from returning to the attention of the court. With the scarcity of sound assessment instruments, all too often these professionals end of making recommendations and referrals that are based on insufficient and inadequate information. Further, growing numbers of youth coming to the attention of the juvenile court do not have an offense history per se, but rather have committed status offenses or otherwise are deemed incorrigible/unruly. Unfortunately, the few instruments that have been developed for purposes of assessing court-involved youth have focused solely on risk factors related to recidivism, rather than more broad-based indicators of adolescent well-being. Additionally, court-involved adolescents typically become impacted by the efforts of multiple systems of care. Professionals working in agencies outside of the court – including but not limited to school systems, mental health agencies, and child protective services – often are ill-prepared to deal with these youth because these professionals similarly do not obtain nor are they given adequate information about the needs of these youth and their families. Hence, there is the need to develop an assessment instrument that taps into more global indicators that are associated with known pathways to a variety of problem behaviors. Simultaneously, such an assessment device should be able to generate meaningful information that informs decision-making about how to refer these youth and their families to the most appropriate services. Finally, this measure would create a common tool for information-sharing across systems of care that are involved in the lives of these youth. Specifically, social service organizations would be able to track youth and families in multiple systems over time. Tracking features of the GRAD website include the ability to compare scores on the GRAD assessment to subsequent referrals made to community-based services, the ability to identify gaps in available services, and the ability to compare pre and post treatment scores on the GRAD as a way of making an initial determination about the effectiveness of recommended programming. Progress to Date:An effort has been undertaken to develop a global risk assessment device that taps into a variety of domains commonly associated with adolescent development and well-being. Items were either taken from existing measures of adolescent problem behaviors or were newly created for this measure, and were piloted with a sample of court-involved adolescents and their families who were referred to a family-based diversion program. This resulted in data being collected from 248 youth (130 males and 118 females) and their families who were referred to a diversion program. Analysis of data from these youth and families provided good initial reliability and validity evidence. Following efforts to both eliminate items that did not work well in the first study and add new items that reflected additional global concerns, a second pilot study was conducted with a random sample of youth coming to the attention of the intake/diversion department of a local juvenile court. This resulted in data being collected from an additional 373 youth (207 males and 166 females) and their families. Data analysis procedures generated additional reliability and validity evidence regarding the use of this type of instrument in populations of court-involved youth and their families. The creation of a revised version of what now has become known as the Global Risk Assessment Device (GRAD) was predicated on the need to
In addition, the decision was made to build an internet version of the GRAD. The main reason behind this decision involved the desire to build an assessment instrument that was psychometrically sound yet both easily accessible and user friendly, thus bridging the gap between the empirical and the practical. The steps to build this new web-based version of the GRAD included:
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