This document reports on the cross-site evaluation of the Juvenile Drug Treatment Court (JDTC) Guidelines, which involved two parallel studies across 10 sites and a participating Traditional Juvenile Court; it provides an overview of the research and the Guidelines; and presents court-level methods and findings along with a summary and recommendations from those court-level findings, youth level methods and results, and conclusions and recommendations.
This document reports on research that was conducted to address a growing concern about the relative effectiveness of juvenile drug treatment courts (JDTCs) and traditional juvenile courts (TJCs). The first chapter summarizes the 2016 JDTC Guidelines; the evaluation goals and research questions; the evaluation design; the evaluation team; and the changes that had to be made in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The second chapter describes the cross-site results in terms of guideline implementation by court type and the logic models used. The report also includes five appendices, which consist of: Court Self-Assessment; site visit protocol, fidelity coding tool, de-identified JDTC logic models; Excel file used for record abstraction; youth assent, parent consent, and youth survey; and a summary of changes during COVID-19.