Contextualising Youth Justice Interventions: Making the Case for Realist Synthesis

Charlie E. Sutton, Mark Monaghan, Stephen Case, Joanne Greenhalgh and Judy Wright
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Charlie E. Sutton: School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Loughborough University, Loughborough LE11 3TT, UK
Mark Monaghan: School of Social Policy, University of Birmingham, Muirhead Tower, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK
Stephen Case: School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Loughborough University, Loughborough LE11 3TT, UK
Joanne Greenhalgh: School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK
Judy Wright: Institute of Health Sciences, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 2, 1-17

Abstract: This article examines the problematic reductionism and decontextualising nature of hegemonic youth justice intervention evaluation and offers a way ahead for a realistic, context-sensitive approach to intervention evaluation in the youth justice field. It opens by considering how the development of risk-based youth justice interventions in England and Wales flowed from and fed into the modernisation and resultant partiality of the ‘evidence-base’, which shaped youth justice practice. It then moves to a critical review of the emergence and continued influence of risk-based interventions and the ‘What Works’ intervention evaluation framework in youth justice. In the closing discussion, this article envisages the potential of taking a realist approach to the evaluation of youth justice interventions to mitigate the limitations of current approaches to intervention selection and the evaluation of their ‘effectiveness’.

Keywords: youth justice; realist; realism; what works; intervention; evaluation; risk factors (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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