Study 1
Mazerolle and colleagues (2017) used a randomized controlled trial to examine the impact of the Ability School Engagement Program (ASEP). The implementation of ASEP was evaluated to determine whether youths who participated in the program exhibited greater decreases in truancy and self-reported greater willingness to attend school or improve school attendance behavior, compared with truant youths who received the standard approach to managing truancy.
A program-dedicated police officer and designated school representatives from 11 highly disadvantaged schools that fell within one police district in Queensland, Australia, recruited youths and their parents to participate in the trial. To be eligible for the study, at least one legally responsible parent who could provide consent had to be willing to participate in a program conference and agree to complete follow-up surveys.
Recruitment was conducted on a rolling basis, and eligible and consenting participants were randomly assigned to the experimental or control groups following the completion of a baseline survey. Of the 319 eligible for the study, 102 truant youths and their families consented to participate in the study between October 2011 and May 2013. A statistician external to the project team used a random number generator to assign the 102 youths to either the control or experimental group. Fifty-one youths were assigned to the experimental group and 51 to the control group. Analysis of both groups at baseline indicated that the groups were equivalent on demographic factors such as age, gender, school level, family background, and truancy behaviors (specific information on the sample characteristics are provided in Study 2). In total, 98 students were included in the final analysis, with 50 in the experimental group and 48 in the control group.
The study measured official absences, self-reported truancy, and increased attempts to go to school more often. Students’ school absences were collected from the Queensland Education Department’s database, and a rate of absenteeism was calculated for each student, with partial-day absences counting as 0.25 or 0.5 of a day, as appropriate. Baseline absentee data was collated across three school terms prior to the date of their random assignment. For high school students, absenteeism was calculated using the proportion of unexplained or unauthorized absences. Since unexplained absences were not frequently recorded for primary school students, absences were calculated using the proportion of absences of any type. Post-intervention data was drawn from the three school terms immediately after receiving business as usual (for the control group) or the group conference and exit from the program (for the treatment group). Self-reported student perceptions of truant behaviors and willingness to attend school were collected through face-to-face surveys. Surveys were conducted immediately prior to random assignment. For the control group, follow-up surveys were administered 3 months after random assignment, and 6 months after random assignment; they were conducted 6 to 9 months after the exit meeting for the experimental group. Follow-up surveys were adapted from the Communities that Care survey (Bond et al. 2000).
Study 2
Bennett and colleagues (2017) used the same study sample as Mazerolle and colleagues (2017) to examine the impact of the ASEP program on measures of crime.
For the full study sample, Bennett and colleagues reported that the average age of students was 13.0 years. A little more than half of the sample (53.0 percent) was male. Most of the sample was in secondary school (57.8 percent). Most of the sample (85.3 percent) was born in Australia, and 12.8 percent were Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander Status. The language spoken at home for most of the study sample (85.3 percent) was English, and 66 percent came from a single-parent household. While there were some differences between the control and experimental groups prior to random assignment, those differences were not statistically significant.
The study measured the rate of offending post-intervention. Official police data for all 102 students was collected and focused on all crime incidents recorded in the Queensland Police Records and Information Database (QPRIME), including arrests, cautions, and warrant records from January 1, 2007, to February 15, 2015. A review of criminal histories indicated that 20 (19.6 percent) students had a total of 90 recorded crime incidents, either pre-or post-intervention. There were no statistically significant differences in crime incidents between the control and experimental groups prior to random assignment. The rate of offending was calculated by dividing the number of crime incidents by the number of days available to offend between the family conference or standard truancy response and the date that the criminal history was pulled from QPRIME.
