Targeted Outreach - Governor's Office of Crime Control & Prevention ...

What Difference Does Participation in the Club/Projects Make in the Lives of Target Youth? 25
IV.
What Difference Does
Participation in the
Clubs/Projects Make in the
Lives of Target Youth?
As we saw in the last chapter, most youth are engaged
and having a positive experience in the Clubs. A
majority of youth attend the Clubs (or have contact
with Club staff) for at least a year and were still participating
regularly at the 12-month follow-up. Given
the difficulty of attracting older and higher-risk
youth into out-of-school programs, this is a major
first step of the process. Ultimately, however, funders
and practitioners care about whether the programs
make a difference in the lives of the youth served. To
address this question, we asked the youth to complete
questionnaires when they joined the Boys &
Girls Club and again approximately 12 months later,
whether they were still participants or not (see
Appendix B for response rates at follow-up). The
final sample of treatment youth consisted of 66
GITTO youth and 236 GPTTO youth who completed
both the pre- and post-surveys.
The youth questionnaire at baseline and follow-up
focused on four main outcome areas, determined in
concert with practitioners who used the GPTTO and
GITTO strategies as well as in consultation with
researchers who have studied gangs and delinquency.
We strove to identify outcomes that could be expected
to change over one year’s time. The areas are:
• Relationship behaviors (e.g., negative conflict
resolution, positive relationships with family,
relationships with a positive peer group);
• Positive use of leisure time (e.g., engagement in
positive after-school activities, leadership roles);
• School behaviors (e.g., expectations to graduate,
school grades, skipping school and cutting
classes, getting suspended, working on homework
and valuing school);
• Delinquent behaviors (e.g., stealing, drinking,
using illegal substances, vandalizing, getting
caught for illegal actions); and
• Gang behaviors (e.g., hanging out with a negative
group of peers, associating with and engaging
in delinquent and aggressive behaviors with
gang members, belonging to a gang).
In addition to assessing increases in positive achievements
and behaviors and decreases in negative
behaviors over time, we also examined whether
GPTTO Clubs’ efforts were effective at keeping
youth who had not yet engaged in certain delinquent
or gang behaviors at the beginning of the evaluation