Becoming Adults: One-Year Impact Findings from the Youth Villages Transitional Living Evaluation

Young adults with histories of foster care or juvenile justice custody experience poor outcomes across a number of domains, on average, relative to their peers. While government funding for services targeting these groups of young people has increased in recent years, research on the effectiveness of such services is limited, and few of the programs that have been rigorously tested have been found to improve outcomes. The Youth Villages Transitional Living Evaluation is testing whether the Transitional Living program, operated by the social service organization Youth Villages, makes a difference in the lives of young people with histories of foster care or juvenile justice custody. The program, which was renamed "YVLifeSet" in April 2015, is intended to help these young people make a successful transition to adulthood by providing intensive, individualized, and clinically focused case management, support, and counseling

Moving into Adulthood: Implementation Findings from the Youth Villages Transitional Living Evaluation

The Youth Villages Transitional Living program is intended to help youth who were formerly in foster care or juvenile justice custody, or who are otherwise unprepared for adult life, to make the transition to independent living. Youth Villages, which serves emotionally and behaviorally troubled young people, operates a number of programs in addition to Transitional Living.All of its programs are based on a set of core principles that emphasize treatment planning, systematic assessment of participating youth, and delivery of only evidence-informed practices within a highly structured supervisory system. Transitional Living clients receive intensive, individualized, and clinically focused and communnity-based case management, support, and counseling from staff who carry caseloads of about eight clients each. Youth eligibility is determined through an extensive recruitment and assessment process. Once youth are enrolled, Transitional Living staff continue to assess them to identify needs and work with them to develop goals, which become the basis of required weekly meetings. Over nine months, on average, program participants get support for education, housing, mental or physical health, employment, and life skills. This support is provided in a variety of forms, including action-oriented activities that involve completing a specific task during a weekly session or through more traditional counseling techniques.The Transitional Living Evaluation is focused exclusively on the program in Tennessee, although Youth Villages also has Transitional Living programs in six other states

Becoming Adults, Executive Summary: One-Year Impact Findings from the Youth Villages Transitional Living Evaluation

The Youth Villages Transitional Living Evaluation is testing whether the Transitional Living program, operated by the social service organization Youth Villages, makes a difference in the lives of young people with histories of foster care or juvenile justice custody. The program, which was renamed "YVLifeSet" in April 2015, is intended to help these young people make a successful transition to adulthood by providing intensive, individualized, and clinically focused case management, support, and counseling. The evaluation uses a rigorous random assignment design and is set in Tennessee, where Youth Villages operates its largest Transitional Living program. From October 2010 to October 2012, more than 1,300 young people were assigned, at random, to either a program group, which was offered the Transitional Living program's services, or to a control group, which was not offered those services. Using survey and administrative data, the evaluation team is measuring outcomes for both groups over time to assess whether Transitional Living services led to better outcomes for program group youth compared with the control group's outcomes

Procedural Justice-Informed Alternatives to Contempt Demonstration

The federal Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) launched the Procedural Justice-Informed Alternatives to Contempt (PJAC) demonstration to test the efficacy of incorporating procedural justice principles into child support practices as a cost-effective alternative to contempt. In this context, contempt is a legal action involving the use of civil court proceedings against noncustodial parents who have fallen behind in their child support payments. Procedural justice centers on the idea that individuals’ perception of the fairness of an administrative or legal process and how they are treated during it determines how they respond to it. In child support programs, the parents’ reaction to the process can have important implications for the outcome of their cases. The goal of the demonstration is to employ techniques that are designed to increase parents’ perception of fairness in the child support process and, as a result, to improve cooperation with child support administrators, increase reliable child support payments, and reduce the ineffective use of contempt. OCSE awarded the Georgia Department of Human Resources a cooperative agreement to procure and manage the evaluation of PJAC. The department contracted with MDRC and its partners, MEF Associates and the Center for Court Innovation, to evaluate PJAC. The overall objective of the PJAC evaluation is to document and assess the effectiveness of the PJAC interventions, which six participating child support agencies are implementing. The participating agencies are located in Arizona; California; Michigan; Franklin County, Ohio; Stark County, Ohio; and Virginia. The research team is evaluating PJAC using random assignment, the most rigorous evaluation method available. The PJAC evaluation includes three primary components: Implementation study. The implementation study will describe the PJAC services, how they operated, and the differences between PJAC and the business as usual child support enforcement process. The evaluation team will conduct interviews with child support staff, clients, and partners; conduct a staff survey; observe program activities; and analyze data from child support agencies’ management information systems and a PJAC-specific management information system. Impact study. Using administrative data, the impact study will measure the effects of PJAC on key outcomes, including child support payments, child support debt, and judicial system outcomes. Benefit-cost study. The benefit-cost study will measure the monetary cost of the PJAC services relative to the cost of usual child support enforcement contempt practices. The study will then compare these costs with the monetary benefits generated by PJAC, if any, which may include reduced court and contempt processing costs and increased child support payments