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Court-involved adolescents represent a high-risk and high-needs population. Services provided to this population aim to improve individual and family functioning as well as reduce recidivism. However, court-involved adolescents are at increased risk of premature termination from services, reducing the likelihood of treatment effectiveness. The current study aimed to investigate family functioning as a variable potentially impacting treatment completion. Analyses involved data drawn from a program evaluation of Functional Family Therapy, which has been hailed as an effective treatment for court-involved families. Looking at measures of relationship quality and parental monitoring, this investigation considered the differential ability of parent report and child report to predict treatment completion, as well as the significance of agreement between parent and child reports. Differences in recidivism outcomes for those who did and did not complete treatment were also explored. Results suggested that parent report of family functioning, particularly relationship quality, may serve as a useful predictor of treatment completion, though significant interactions indicated that parent report must be considered in relation to child report. In contrast to anticipated findings, parent—child agreement alone did not appear to predict treatment completion, highlighting the need to interpret informant discrepancies within the context of the construct being measured. Finally, higher levels of treatment completion were associated with lower levels of recidivism, offering support for the effectiveness of FFT and underscoring the need to further understand factors which inform treatment engagement. |
