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Year Awarded: 2008
Project Leaders:
Merry Morash, Criminal Justice, Thomas Luster, Family and Child Ecology, Greta Wu, Peckham Incorporated
Project Description:
The project will develop a new collaboration between PIs Morash and Luster, and bring together their frameworks in feminist/criminal justice theory and ecological/adolescent development theory to study girls in the juvenile justice system. This is a neglected group in national scholarship, and qualitative research is needed as the basis for future evaluation or other research on the group. The community partner, Peckham, and its residential program for girls (Footprints), want to develop a research partnership with MSU to include and go beyond the present pilot and topic area. Approximately 40 girls will take part in intensive retrospective interviews to understand the positive and negative results during past involvement with the Ingham County Juvenile Court. Involvement includes program placement. Theoretical sampling will be used to choose girls categorized by the courts objective scheme as serious delinquents, but differing in experiences: without residential placement, placed outside the county, placed with the community partner (both with and without successful completion, and with and without new involvement with the Court). A life calendar approach will be used to collect primarily qualitative data; some quantitative data will be collected or derived by coding the qualitative data. The ultimate aim is to show positive, negative, and needed intervention/program elements given the context of girls' families and communities, to usefully disseminate this information in the County, and to use the resulting information as the basis for funded evaluation research on programs for girls and/or replications and extensions of the research in different community types.
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