The Consistent Pattern of Youth Needs: A Latent Profile Analysis of 10-States' Assessment Findings

• In Event: Decoding Juvenile Risk: Review of Tools and Trends

Abstract

Risk-need assessments are an essential component of juvenile justice evaluations and play a crucial role in the prioritization of programming to reduce a youth’s system contact. However, these tools typically take the stance that high-risk automatically indicates high needs, which is not always the case. This paper argues that a shift away from risk-dependent classifications is essential. Rather, juvenile assessments must begin to shift to a needs-based approach. The current study utilized a latent profile analysis to assess how youth’s scores across six needs domains can be used to identify a universal set of needs categories. We collected assessment scores from a total of 258,464 eligible youth. Our LPA identified a five-profile solution consistent with youths’ scores across the scale continuums – (1) Very-High, (2) High, (3) Moderate, (4) Low, and (5) Very Low-Needs. We found a set of consistent needs profiles, with a youth who falls into the High-Needs group also having the highest scores across all six domains. Each remaining group followed a consistent rank across the constructions. In line with previous research, we found that 5% of the youth population falls within the very high-needs and very-low needs categories, respectively. These findings were consistent across demographic factors.

Authors

• Sadie Brewer, University of Nebraska Omaha

• Zachary Hamilton, The University of Nebraska at Omaha

• Xiaohan Mei, California State University, Los Angeles