Brief Intervention with Truant Youth.

Truant youths represent an important target group for addressing drug use and related problems, and lowering risk for moving into the juvenile justice system. We are implementing and evaluating a brief intervention (BI) for truant youths brought to a Tampa, FL Truancy Center by law enforcement. We plan to enroll 300 official non-delinquent and minor delinquent truants and their parents in this NIDA funded, Stage 2 clinical trial. The BI is grounded in Rational-Emotive Therapy and Behavior Problem Solving Therapy. Three groups will be compared: (1) a 2-session youth only condition (BI-Y), (2) a 2-session youth and 1-session parent condition (BI-YP), and (3) a standard truancy services (STS) condition. The impact of these service conditions on drug use and related behaviors (e.g., delinquent behavior) will be assessed up to 18 months, involving five data collection points. We hypothesize that both the BI-Y and BI-YP conditions will reveal significant intervention effects compared to the STS group, and that BI-YP participants will reveal greater treatment effects compared to BI-Y, based on the expectation that enhanced parenting will favorably impact intervention effects. We report on the design, implementation and some preliminary results from this study. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]