Abstract
Annually, 100,000 delinquent youths return to their communities from a detention facility and are required to attend a community school. School social workers may be best positioned to provide assistance with this transition; however, little is understood about how they are presently servicing this population. This study explores the interactions of school social workers and the advocacy and assistance they provide on behalf of juvenile justice youths. The author surveyed a national sample of current school social workers (n = 4,279) and reports on their involvement with juvenile justice, their work on behalf of the youths' families as well as their interagency collaborations.
Highlights
Social work practitioners in diverse practice settings are being asked to implement and evaluate evidence-based practices on behalf of their client populations
The principal motivation for this study is to begin to put together an empirical foundation for the study of social work’s involvement with the juvenile justice system. This investigation finds that of the three areas of primary contact with juvenile justice youths—direct contact, work with their families, and contact with the agencies that serve them—the first and second of these three areas receive the most attention from school social workers
Greater involvement by school social workers in any one of these three areas was shown to have an association with greater involvement in either of the other two areas under investigation
Summary
Social work practitioners in diverse practice settings are being asked to implement and evaluate evidence-based practices on behalf of their client populations. The survey respondents were asked a number of interrelated questions that sought to learn more about how school social workers are engaging with the students involved in the juvenile justice system, their families, and other institutional providers. These survey questions were submitted to a principal components analysis in order to “reduce” them to a smaller, more “fundamental” set of summary dimensions. We present the “pattern” matrix from this three-component solution As indicated in this table, the first component references various events and behaviors that characterize the role of the school social worker in dealing with juvenile justice students. The third component addresses the role of the school social worker in working with the families of juvenile justice students
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