Functional Family Therapy for Gang Populations (FFT-G): Program Effects

The FFT-G intervention is designed to reduce gang involvement and criminal involvement by strengthening family processes, reducing parent and child negative behaviors and attitudes, increasing child’s involvement in constructive activities, and altering child’ peer relationship. The ultimate outcomes as well as the major hypothesized mediators were measured with interviews of all participating youths and their care-givers. These instruments were developed in collaboration with the FFT developers and made use wherever possible of existing scales that had been tested previously and demonstrated reliable and valid. Interviews were completed prior to random assignment and at 6 months post-randomization. The six-month response rates were 93% for juveniles and 91.5% for adults. This presentation reports on the construction of outcome measures and their reliabilities. It also reports on treatment-control differences for all mediators and outcomes measured in the interviews.

The research is expected to produce a program model that is ready for broad dissemination, an existing dissemination mechanism, and a model for how public agencies can utilize EBPs using existing funding streams. This presentation will conclude with implications of the research for community uptake of evidence-based practices.