Reducing law-breaking behavior of court-involved Black girls: A mixed methods approach to test a healing informed stress reduction intervention

• In Event: Integrating Perspectives: Developing a multi-faceted understanding of community violence and safety

Abstract

Black girls are more than three times as likely as their white peers to be incarcerated even though the majority commit low level crimes. Despite their histories of trauma associated with their arrests, they are rarely the focus of studies to reduce their delinquency and/or their associated trauma and stress. We will test an adapted healing intervention with court-involved Black girls and their parents/caregivers (P/Cs) in Central Ohio. Guided by intersectionality, this multimodal mixed methods study will investigate feasibility, and acceptability of the intervention with 35 P/C-child dyads. This study includes interviews with girls and their P/Cs (n=10 dyads) in Phase I and a nonrandomized test of the intervention in Phase II (N=25 dyads). We will collect measures of PTSD, recidivism, racial identity, and a cortisol measure (hair) to test physiological biomarker of stress. Thematic analysis will be used with the qualitative data and descriptive and dyad analyses will be used with the quantitative data and the findings will be integrated. We believe the intervention will show signs of effectiveness with a moderate effect size. We anticipate that our rigorous methodologies will yield valuable insights into the mechanisms underlying the observed associations, as well as the utility of the intervention.

Author

• Camille R. Quinn, University of Michigan