The Critical Case File Approach: A Novel Tool for Critically Analyzing Mixed-Method Data as Exemplified in a Juvenile Legal Setting.

Current criminology and corrections research is limited in its ability to fully conceptualize and analyze inequities in the legal systems' response to young people, particularly those with multiple marginalized identities. This article presents a novel methodological framework-the Critical Case File (CCF) approach-to advance methodological innovations in criminal and juvenile legal system research. Specifically, the CCF approach leverages the rich multisystem information available within case file data and analyzes it through a critical lens to examine (a) the structural factors (e.

Exploring the needs of girls of color in the juvenile legal system: A latent class analysis.

Girls of color are overrepresented in the juvenile legal system and experience high levels of unmet needs. Assessing and meeting girls' needs may prevent system contact or deeper involvement by providing for these needs in community-based settings, rather than through juvenile legal systems. This study used a structured interview-based assessment adapted from an advocacy intervention to examine girls' self-identified needs and perceived effectiveness and difficulty of accessing resources for these needs.

Mixed methods in community psychology: A values-forward synthesis.

Mixed methods research (MMR) combines multiple traditions, methods, and worldviews to enrich research design and interpretation of data. In this virtual special issue, we highlight the use of MMR within the field of community psychology. The first MMR studies appeared in flagship community psychology journals over 30 years ago (in 1991).

Persistent Paternalism: The Instantiation of Gendered Attributions in the System Response to Girls.

Prior research suggests that the juvenile legal system does too little to address the sources and underlying reasons for girls' court referrals. Drawing on attribution theories, the current study examined perspectives that characterize the response of the system to girls' behaviors. Data from this study were derived from a multimethod, qualitative study on system-involved girls.

"Roses have thorns for a reason": The promises and perils of critical youth participatory research with system-impacted girls of Color.

Scholarship on girlhood-especially for girls of Color-is often relegated to studying risk and emphasizing individual deficits over humanizing girls and centering their voices. This approach to generating scholarship renders oppressive systems and processes invisible from inquiry and unaddressed by practice, with particularly insidious consequences for youth in the legal system. Critical youth participatory action research (YPAR) is acknowledged as an antidote to these conceptualizations because it resists deficit-oriented narratives circling systems-impacted youth by inviting them to the knowledge-generating table.

A Treatment-To-Prison-Pipeline? Scoping Review and Multimethod Examination of Legal Consequences of Residential Treatment Among Adolescents.

Objective: Toward the overall goal of interrogating systems that contribute to racial inequity in child and adolescent psychology, we examine the role and function of Residential Treatment Centers (RTCs) in creating or exacerbating race and gender inequities using the language of mental health and the logic that treatment intentions justify children's confinement.

Methods: In Study 1, we conduct a scoping review to investigate the legal consequences of RTC placement, attending to race and gender in 18 peer-reviewed articles, encompassing data for 27,947 youth. In Study 2, we use a multimethod design focusing on RTCs in one large mixed-geographic county to examine which youth are formally charged with a crime while in RTCs, and the circumstances under which these charges occur, attending to race and gender ( = 318, 95% Black, Latine, Indigenous youth, mean age = 14, range = 8-16).

Predictors of Sexual and Reproductive Health Among Girls Involved in the Juvenile Legal System: the Influence of Resources, Race, and Ethnicity.

Girls involved in the juvenile legal system are at among the highest risk for sexual and reproductive health (SRH) challenges. Yet, few studies focus on girls or examine multiple predictors of their SRH in tandem. In addition to individual and familial-level risk factors (e.

A Mindfulness-Based Intervention to Alleviate Stress From Discrimination Among Young Sexual and Gender Minorities of Color: Protocol for a Pilot Optimization Trial.

Background: Young sexual and gender minorities (SGMs) of color may face unique experiences of discrimination based on their intersectional positions (eg, discrimination based on both racial or ethnic identity and sexual identity). Emerging evidence suggests that mindfulness practices may reduce stress from discrimination and improve overall well-being among young SGM. Moreover, the omnipresence of smartphone access among racial or ethnic and sexual minority communities provides a method through which to administer mindfulness-based interventions among young SGMs of color.

Perceiving fairness in an unfair world: System justification and the mental health of girls in detention facilities.

Psychologists in the helping professions have long accepted the idea that cognitions have implications for mental health and wellbeing. Community psychologists have further established the importance of context and systems in the etiology of mental health problems. In this paper, we argue that as a discipline that prioritizes social justice, community psychology should consider associations between cognitions about structural and systemic inequality and individual mental health, particularly in marginalized populations.

When Diversity is Not Enough: An Intersectional Examination of How Juvenile Legal System Actors of Color Experience the System's Welfare Mandate for Girls of Color.

System actors of color are considered a key intervention to reduce disparities in the juvenile legal system precisely because they share intersectional experiences of oppression similar to those experienced by system-involved youth. In this study, we interrogate the assumption that diversifying the workforce can remedy intersectional disparities in youth outcomes. Grounded in intersectionality, we analyzed semi-structured interviews with 17 (12 women, five men) actors of color-eight at the frontline, five at the mid-level, and four at the top level.

Traumatic Incidents and Experiences of Racism and Sexism: Examining Associations with Components of Critical Consciousness for System-Involved Girls of Color.

Scholarship identifies critical consciousness as a key developmental asset in promoting the well-being of adolescents experiencing multiple socio-structural axes of oppression. Girls of color at acute risk for legal system involvement or re-involvement are absent from this literature. They are a critical population in which to examine this construct given their experiences of oppression and the myriad benefits of critical consciousness.

A role for social media? A community-based response to guns, gangs, and violence online.

Social media represents a relatively novel environment for prevention efforts targeting youth gun and gang violence, and associated trauma. The aim of this study is, therefore, to present findings from a novel intervention designed to complement existing, community-based violence prevention efforts. In doing so, we focus on the role of adult empathy in the relationships between youth and the adult credible messengers (CMs) who deliver the program.

Factor structure of the critical consciousness scale in juvenile legal system-involved boys and girls.

The Critical Consciousness Scale (CCS) is a recently developed and validated measure for use with low-income, diverse adolescents. However, research on the psychometric properties of this scale with juvenile legal system-involved youth is lacking. This study examines the psychometric properties of the critical reflection subscales of the CCS in a cross-sectional sample of 206 youth (48% girls) involved in the juvenile legal system to investigate (a) the factor structure of the critical reflection subscales of the CCS compared to existing adolescent samples, and (b) the extent to which critical reflection demonstrates measurement equivalence between boys and girls.

Examining latent profiles of psychopathy in a mixed-gender sample of juvenile detainees.

There is growing support for the disaggregation of psychopathy into primary and secondary variants. The present study used latent profile analysis to distinguish psychopathic variants in a sample of male and female adolescent detainees ( = 162). Youth were classified by their scores on the self-report Triarchic Psychopathy Measure, indexing trait Boldness, Meanness, and Disinhibition, as well as measures of anxiety and guilt.

A Meta-Analysis of Program Characteristics for Youth with Disruptive Behavior Problems: The Moderating Role of Program Format and Youth Gender.

There is high variability in efficacy for interventions for youth with disruptive behavior problems (DBP). Despite evidence of the unique correlates and critical consequences of girls' DBP, there is a dearth of research examining treatment efficacy for girls. This meta-analysis of 167 unique effect sizes from 29 studies (28,483 youth, 50% female; median age: 14) suggests that existing treatments have a medium positive effect on DBP (g = .

Psychopathic Traits, Pubertal Timing, & Mental Health Functioning in Justice-Involved Adolescents.

Although psychopathic traits and pubertal timing have garnered a great deal of attention as potent risk factors for antisocial trajectories, very little research has examined how these processes may be related. We investigated whether psychopathic traits were related to deviations in pubertal onset in a clinically-relevant sample of youth detained in juvenile detention facilities. One-hundred and thirty-seven adolescents (ages 12-17) completed surveys of pubertal timing, psychopathic traits, and mental health functioning.

Examining the functions of women's violence: Accommodation, resistance, and enforcement of gender inequality.

The present study contributes to the literature on the consequences of social inequality through a qualitative examination of the social functions and meanings of violence in the lives of 20 marginalized women. All of the women in the sample were at some point court involved and were victims, as well as perpetrators, of violence. Findings indicate a need to expand the extant theory to address enforcement (i.

Centering justice: Transforming paradigms of approach, design and implementation.

This concluding article presents visions for future research, prevention, intervention, and policy. This paper positions existing research paradigms against social justice principles, problematizing the ideological underpinnings of the legal system and its disproportionate impact on oppressed groups, including through the persistent overrepresentation of youth of color and/or marginalized genders. Highlighting the areas of challenge suggested by each of the manuscripts within the themed issue, this paper encourages critical shifts in the approach, design, and implementation of work with system-involved youth.

Leveraging youths' digital literacies: The E-Responder social media violence interruption model and pilot evaluation.

Increasingly, altercations and arrests have been traced to youths' actions on social media. The present paper describes E-Responder, an intervention developed through a university-community partnership to address three key goals for youth at risk of legal system involvement and firearms-related violence: (1) preventing the escalation of online provocation to in-person violence; (2) supporting youth in enhancing social media self-efficacy; and (3) supporting Violence Prevention Professionals (VPPs), already working with youth, in using social media as a tool to interrupt potential violence and leverage youth's digital citizenship. This paper describes the E-Responder mixed-methods pilot; findings suggest that E-Responder sites identified over 100 instances of risky online behavior (22% high risk) and effectively addressed 97% of these instances.

Critical issues for youth involved in the juvenile justice system: Innovations in prevention, intervention, and policy.

This introduction to the themed issue presents a targeted review of historical and contemporary trends in the prevention, intervention, and policy response to juvenile justice system-involved youth. These trends underscore often overlooked ideological assumptions that implicate individual-level problem definitions, a pattern of victim blaming tendencies despite having a workforce increasingly trained in assessing context, and a system whose rehabilitative mandate is at odds with the social demand to maintain itself and its structures through keeping youth system-involved. Further, contemporary trends point to efforts that redirect blame from individual youth to families, and which ultimately ignore the broader sociopolitical context of mass incarceration that has selectively disenfranchized those same families.

Determinants of Intimate Partner Violence Among Young Men Who Have Sex With Men: The P18 Cohort Study.

Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) is an understudied health problem among young gay, bisexual, and other non-identified young men who have sex with men (YMSM). According to cross-sectional studies, IPV is associated with psychosocial and mental health problems, such as stigma and depression, among YMSM. IPV is also associated with health-risk behaviors, such as substance use, among this population.

Theorizing Safety Informed Settings: Supporting Staff at Youth Residential Facilities.

Each year approximately 48,000 youth are incarcerated in residential placement facilities (YRFs) in the United States. The limited existing literature addressing the workforce in these settings paints a complicated picture. The YRF workforce is highly motivated to work with legal system involved youth.

Policing Education: An Empirical Review of the Challenges and Impact of the Work of School Police Officers.

Public concerns regarding school safety and zero-tolerance education policies have contributed to the growth of a workforce of school police, or frontline school safety professionals who are typically placed in schools with the authority to arrest students (Brown, 2006). Thus, school police represent a workforce positioned at the nexus of multiple systems, including education and juvenile justice, and whose work likely brings them into contact with underserved youth and families. Despite national representation of this growing workforce (e.

Contextualizing pubertal development: The combination of sexual partners' age and girls' pubertal development confers risk for externalizing but not internalizing symptoms among girls in therapeutic day schools.

Objective: Early pubertal development is associated with negative health and mental health outcomes. Research on the influence of puberty on mental health underscores a need to examine the interplay between puberty and exposure to environmental risk. This study investigates a more rarely studied aspect of girls' environments - romantic relationships with boyfriends.