By Populations Children

Evidence-Based Practices

NRI's Center for Mental Health Quality and Accountability developed a matrix of children's EBPs to provide a brief, yet comprehensive snapshot of each intervention or program's goals and expected outcomes. For each intervention, the matrix includes the following:

• Description of the intervention
• Evidence of its effectiveness
• Availability of technical assistance and training materials
• Population and setting with which the program was tested
• Resources that identify the program or intervention

This matrix is recommended as a reference tool to identify the current information available in the field about programs, practices, and core components that have been evaluated for positive outcomes with children and their families.

State Reviews of Research on Evidence-Based Practices

In an effort to assist state mental health directors in selecting interventions to incorporate into their own systems, Virginia, Hawaii, and Oregon have begun to review the literature on EBPs. Their reviews offer helpful information about evidence for treatments categorized by intervention type and disorder

Websites Containing Information on EBPs for Special Populations

Blueprints for Violence Prevention

The Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence (CSPV) at the University of Colorado at Boulder sponsors a website containing information on model and promising programs, including program descriptions, references to the research, and contact information to obtain the manuals and training.

Empirically Supported Treatments and Promising Practices

This page, from the National Child Traumatic Stress Network site, provides extensive information on empirically supported treatments and promising practices for children and adolescents exposed to traumatic experiences. A summary table identifies (a) the level of available evidence, (b) the intervention and corresponding developer site, and (c) a brief description. A series of fact sheets are also available which address the interventions included in the table.

What Works in Youth Development

Child Trends has developed a series of Youth Development Tables that provide guidance on what works and doesnt work with regard to a variety youth development topics, including emotional and mental health. This page, from the Child Trends site, contains links to these tables, as well as a series of briefs which address each of the topics contained in the tables.

Cost Effectiveness

Cost is an important part of selecting an EBP. Three recent reports analyze the cost-effectiveness of different youth intervention programs:

• Comparative Costs and Benefits of Programs to Reduce Crime: This report from the Washington State Policy Institute summarizes the research on cost benefits of interventions to reduce crime by youth. The report concludes that in the last two decades research on what works and what does not has developed; this information can be used to improve public resource allocation. These estimates can assist decision-makers in directing scarce public resources toward economically successful programs and away from unsuccessful programs, thereby producing net overall gains to taxpayers, even in the absence of new funding sources.
• Cost Effectiveness of Youth Intervention Programs: Researchers made rough estimates of the costs and benefits of four early interventions: prenatal home visits by child care professionals, followed by four years of daycare; training for parents with young children who have shown aggressive behavior; incentives to induce disadvantaged high school students to graduate; and monitoring and supervising young delinquents. All except the first appeared to cost-effective as a popular, but very different, approach to crime reduction: California's Three Strikes law.
• Treatment Costs for Youth Receiving Multi-Systemic Therapy: Researchers carried out a cost analysis for Multi-Systemic Therapy (MST) and found that among youth presenting psychiatric emergencies, MST was associated with better outcomes at a lower cost during the initial post-referral period and with equivalent costs and outcomes during the 12-month follow-up period.