A Different Kind of Evidence? Looking for ‘What Works’ in Engaging Young Offenders
| Published date | 01 December 2010 |
| Author | Paul Mason,David Prior |
| DOI | 10.1177/1473225410381688 |
| Date | 01 December 2010 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Corresponding author:
Dr David Prior, School of Social Policy, University of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK.
Email: d.prior@bham.ac.uk
A Different Kind of Evidence?
Looking for ‘What Works’ in
Engaging Young Offenders
David Prior and Paul Mason
Abstract
The skills and knowledge required by practitioners to develop relationships with young offenders that will
engage and sustain them in intervention programmes is a core theme of the ‘effective practice’ literature. Yet
this question of how to secure young people’s engagement is scarcely examined in research on interventions
with young offenders, despite an apparent preoccupation with ‘what works’. The article discusses this
disjuncture between the research and practice literatures, arguing that prevailing orthodoxies regarding what
constitutes valid research evidence prevent certain questions about what works and how from being studied.
It is suggested that both the practice literature and alternative research methodologies can provide rigorous
evidence in response to these questions.
Keywords
engagement, evidence, practice, research, young offenders
Introduction
In 2002/3 the Youth Justice Board for England and Wales (YJB), as part of its remit to
develop and promote good practice throughout the youth justice services, published a series
of guidance booklets under the generic title Key Elements of Effective Practice (KEEPs).
Designed for a practitioner audience, KEEPs were brief and punchy documents setting out
the core principles and actions that should shape the effective delivery of distinct compo-
nents of youth justice work, so that individual KEEPs covered topics such as assessment;
final warnings; restorative justice; remand management; mentoring; and others. Importantly,
however, the principles and actions which were intended to guide practitioners in these
various aspects of their work were derived from systematic reviews of research into the
effectiveness of different approaches. These reviews were commissioned from independent
researchers and resulted in the production of substantial ‘source documents’ which set out
Youth Justice
10(3) 211–226
© The Author(s) 2010
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1473225410381688
yjj.sagepub.com
212 Youth Justice 10(3)
in detail the current state of ‘evidence’ which could support good practice. The source
documents were made available on the YJB website (www.yjb.gov.uk).
In 2006 the YJB decided to produce a new series of KEEPs and, as the first step in the
process, again commissioned a series of systematic reviews to provide the evidence base
for the practice guidance. The ten topics for which reviews were commissioned were:
assessment; techniques for engagement; accommodation; education, employment and
training; mental health; offending behaviour programmes; parenting support; restorative
justice; substance misuse; and young people who sexually abuse (YJB, 2008a). We were
commissioned to undertake the review of research into effective practice in relation to
techniques of engagement, or, in the words of the original brief, ‘Studies that evidence the
impact of approaches to engaging young offenders or those identified as at risk of involve-
ment in offending’. The brief for the review strongly emphasized that it should be con-
ducted according to the established principles and procedures of systematic review
(Campbell Collaboration, 2009). We thus prepared a set of review protocols, which were
agreed with the commissioners, setting out the process to be pursued including search
procedures and inclusion criteria (see Mason and Prior, 2008: 56-59).
As early work on the review progressed, discussions with the YJB commissioners indi-
cated a degree of ambiguity about precisely what was meant by ‘techniques of engage-
ment’. This resulted in the following working definition eventually being adopted:
Techniques for engaging young people who offend are concerned with the question of how
to gain young people’s interest and willing participation in interventions or programmes of
interventions intended to prevent or reduce offending. ‘Engagement’ suggests a set of objec-
tives around developing young people’s personal motivation and commitment to involve-
ment in activities. It implies that passive involvement is not enough – for example, if a young
person attends and takes part in a prescribed programme of activities but does not feel any
commitment to the objectives of the programme and is not motivated to benefit, through
learning or personal development, from the programme activities, then they are not ‘engaged’
and the programme is unlikely to be successful. For practitioners, the implication is that spe-
cific skills and knowledge (‘techniques’) are required to achieve engagement, in addition to
skills and knowledge associated with the particular type of intervention (Mason and Prior,
2008: 12).
This definition establishes a crucial distinction between engagement techniques and inter-
ventions or programmes; engagement techniques are taken to refer to a specific set of
skills and knowledge that is a necessary component of effective practice regardless of the
particular type of intervention in which the young person is being engaged. Moreover, the
definition suggests that securing the engagement of young people in youth justice inter-
ventions is of particular significance: that without successful engagement, interventions or
programmes – no matter how well designed – are unlikely to achieve positive outcomes.
Extensive searching of a range of research databases indicated that while there was
much analysis and evaluation focused on types of intervention, there was very little that
specifically addressed the issue of ‘techniques’, i.e. the factors that actually made an
To continue reading
Request your trial