Search Results

This chapter aims to teach practitioners how to search efficiently and effectively for the best available evidence. There are three major clearinghouses for systematic reviews: the What Works Clearinghouse, the Campbell Collaboration, and SAMHSA's Registry of Evidence-Based Programs & Practices. The web is best searched using Boolean logic. There are two major public databases. ERIC focuses on educational research. PubMed contains information on health-related conditions. The private web has the best databases by which to find evidence. There are two major private databases for mental health clinicians. PsycINFO is the most relevant database that school-based practitioners can access. Social Work Abstracts is the smallest and will be of most use to school social workers. Finally, practitioners need to screen the evidence they find and triangulate their search to justify their clinical decision-making.

The WOWW (Working on What Works) program strives to empower teachers in regular and special education settings to recognize their own strengths as well as their students' strengths in setting goals and to work together in a collaborative manner. It was first developed by solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT) pioneers Insoo Kim Berg and Lee Shilts in Florida in 2002. After starting in Florida, the program was pilot tested in other states, including several schools in Chicago. There has also been work with Metropolitan Family Services of Chicago working in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) Community in Schools Programs. This chapter shares some of these preliminary findings on WOWW's success in helping students and teachers, as well as identifying challenges in implementing WOWW successfully in schools that may not yet be solution-focused settings for teachers and students. Specifically, it discusses how WOWW can begin to address three crucial areas in today's schools: increasing the classroom management skills of teachers to produce less burnout and higher teacher retention in challenging schools and ultimately better academic and social emotional/behavioral outcomes for students.

This chapter sets Connected Communities in the context of current thinking on local economic development in the 'post-regeneration' era. I briefly survey post-1997 state-led regeneration in the UK, tracing the shift in England from holistic neighbourhood-level social inclusion initiatives to economically-focused local growth programmes. Next, I highlight the various 'shocks' that have hit these regeneration models since 2007, and discuss where this leaves neighbourhood-level activity in particular. The theories of change invoked for such programmes suggest that their economic impacts will be small, but that interventions also have an important non-economic rationale. Getting a sense of ‘what works’ in urban regeneration is challenging, however, given the multifaceted nature of the programmes and underlying system complexity. The UK’s emerging experimentalist paradigm could generate a more convincing evidence base for neighbourhood-level urban regeneration, but there are real constraints to what localism and the 'what works' agenda can do, particularly under austerity.

This chapter looks at the development of practice with adult offenders, along with far-reaching changes that have taken place in how society views and responds to offending by young people. There has been a growth of the number and range of professionals and organisations involved in work with offenders both adults and young people. As the delivery of practice has become more diverse, so too have understandings of crime and those who commit it. The relative simplicity of the original police court missionary's role has given way to more complex and complicated responses to crime; responses which require policy, coordination and management. This chapter briefly touches on some of the developments that have taken place over the last century in face-to-face work with offenders. It emphasises the changing nature of the worker-offender relationship and its continued importance as an alliance in the process of managing change. It also discusses organisational changes and case management, the ‘What Works’ initiative and the development of effective practice, and the risk of reoffending.

At the time of their initial interviews, few probationers felt that they had gained much from their probation officers that would be of help in avoiding offending. Is this still the case, or have the probationers now started to see the longer-term benefits? We know little about the long-term impacts of probation supervision, but interviews from the fourth sweep suggested that some ‘lessons’ from probation had been learnt, but had taken a long time to ‘bear fruit’. Our continued exploration into the whether the needs of probationers have been met over the medium to long term suggested that probation did indeed help probationers stop offending. This strand of work builds upon previous sweeps of interviews as well as helping to develop a theory of assisted desistance. Whilst there have been several attempts to develop theories of desistance few have attempted to understand the long-term impacts of probation supervision and how these can be incorporated into a theory of reform.

Social scientists have often had difficulty evaluating the impact of probation services, partly because expectations and political circumstances change and partly because appropriate methodologies have been slow to develop. This chapter outlines the history of evaluative research on probation. It describes the limitations of early probation research which led to erroneous conclusions that ‘nothing works’, and goes on to show how more recent research has been based on a fuller understanding of practitioner inputs through research on programmes, skills and implementation. This is starting to lead to a better understanding of which practices are effective (‘What Works’). The chapter advocates a mixed qualitative and quantitative methodology for evaluative research which combines understanding, measurement and comparison. Finally, it points to some risks to evidence-based policy which arise from current populism and post-truth politics.

This chapter draws on recent studies of how practitioners acquire, interpret, and use research to suggest how to improve the connection between research and practice. Historically, the research community has tried to affect practice by making findings more accurate and writing about them more clearly. These efforts have failed to recognize that practitioners and researchers differ in their definitions of evidence, their ideas on relevance, what constitutes a trustworthy source, and how they acquire research. Recommendations to improve the research–practice connection include targeting administrators and program managers, developing a better understanding of the needs and constraints of these decision makers, creating new forms of research–practice partnerships, and communicating with opinion leaders in practitioners’ networks. The authors critique the dominant paradigm of research-to-practice and call for a reciprocal relationship in which each community influences the other.

This chapter rounds off the book and draws together the main arguments presented not just in this book but in the two books which preceded it. It also distils lessons for future research and practice. Relevant lessons for criminal justice and public policymakers are discussed.

The educational policy changes of the past 20 years have increased the focus on the provision of prevention services within schools, both for individual students and for social-emotional programming delivered in their classroom. Whether characterized as Response to Intervention (RTI), Positive Behavior Intervention and Supports (PBIS), or Multi-Tiered Systems of Supports (MTSS), the focus on a 3-tier framework of universal (Tier 1), selective (Tier 2) and indicated (Tier 3) has become one of the largest evidence-based framework ever scaled up within American schools, with over 19,000 schools across all 50 states having implemented PBIS by this writing. This chapter focuses on an example of a SFBT Tier 2 intervention, the Working on What Works (WOWW) teacher coaching intervention, that strives to create a better classroom climate for teachers and their students.

This chapter discusses the challenges of identifying preventive interventions as effective and of assisting community coalitions to learn about and select EBIs that are a good fit for their community. The scientific standards used to determine intervention effectiveness by various lists of “what works” are compared, and the Blueprints for Healthy Youth Development is highlighted as the database used by coalitions implementing the CTC system. The importance of community resource assessments is also discussed, including the steps taken by CTC coalitions to evaluate their current resources, identify gaps in the delivery of preventive interventions, and determine if current services need to be expanded or new EBIs should be implemented.

This chapter zooms out to identify the overall ‘weight’ of post-war initiatives, under the general banner of UK prevention policy, across multiple policy areas. Many UK governments have faced the same basic prevention puzzle, and the vague idea of prevention policy has risen up and fallen down the UK government policy agenda for most of the post-war era. However, there was a step-change of activity from 1997. The newly elected and self-styled New Labour government, led by Prime Minister Tony Blair, identified something akin to a ‘window of opportunity’ for major changes in policy and policymaking. Compared to its predecessors, it used the language of prevention more frequently, and was far more likely to describe it as a vehicle to address socio-economic inequalities, join up government, and pursue ‘evidence-based policy’. Initially, we find in its social construction of target populations some shift of emphasis from personal responsibility to structural causes of poor outcomes. Yet, we also detect a growing frustration with limited progress and more explicit moral judgements of target populations over time, prompting a more centralized approach to policymaking and a greater focus on ‘problem’ families towards the end of New Labour’s era of government. Most of this prevention agenda continued under the Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition government from 2010 to 2015, albeit with a greater focus on the economy, employability, ‘troubled families’, and individual responsibility.