This document provides a discussion of the Court Self-Assessment for juvenile drug treatment courts and corresponding discussion of the validation study findings; the validation study took place over the course of a one-year period from the summer of 2020 to the summer of 2021.
The authors of this document discuss the findings from a study to validate the Court Self-Assessment (CSA) for juvenile drug treatment courts (JDTs) based on the JDTC Guidelines. The validation study tested a version of the CSA that had been revised based on cognitive testing with sample JDTCs and input from an expert panel, and the authors include that CSA version in the document's appendix, as well as data collection and coding protocols. The authors enrolled 35 JDTCs in the validation study, across seven states and territories. The report is organized by guideline statement; for each guideline, the authors provide a table showing the full set of indicators that the CSA was designed to measure. The charts demonstrate the following information: the indicator; the location of that indicator on the CSA instrument; percentage of the JDTCs that met the criteria for that indicator; and the percent of responses on the CSA that were revised based on the authors' data collection process. The authors also provide two graphs for each guideline: the first plots the total scores for the guideline among all JDTCs in the sample; the second provides another look at the distribution of scores for each indicator where data collection did not challenge the accuracy of the response on the CSA by the JDTC. In the discussion that follows each guideline, the authors describe the findings and point to revisions to the CSA that are reflected in the validated instrument.