The Practical Importance of Evidence-Based for At-Risk Youth: a Review of a Social Welfare Study - Article Example

The article is good to the extent that it helps students and professionals conceptualize the problems facing youths in the community. The Practical Importance of Evidence-Based Programming for At-Risk Youth: A Review of a Social Welfare Study Wong, Marshall, Kerr, Lai and Wood (2008) is a detailed examination of the reasons why certain youths seek out addiction treatment programs. The authors introduce the problem as being with wide-reaching implications, regarding the treatment of street youths and young adults.

Mortality rates and drug addiction rates among youths is highly tied to poverty, health care costs, and other social problems. Finding a way to prevent these street youths from a life of addiction and lost productivity is an important preventative factor in breaking down social barriers. The authors decided to study at-risk youths’ with a cohort design in Vancouver. The participants taking part in the study were recruited on the basis of their desire to enroll in health-related services. Over the course of the study, the authors recruited street youths and young adults (N=478); with questionnaires, they measured the factors that were positively, independently, and significantly associated with the desire to enroll in addiction treatment. . They also note the association between injection drug use and enrollment in treatment as being explained by access to needle exchange programs, which include secondary services such as referrals, counseling, and residential treatment facilities.

Histories of overdose, which are also linked by this study to tendency to seek addiction treatment services, also seem to increase this likelihood of treatment because of referrals by medical staff. In addition, an emergency situation may call the attention of adult family members and peers to the dangers. This study is a timely and helpful addition to the at-risk youth addiction treatment literature that should help experts understand who is more likely to seek out treatment than others. There are two ways in which this could be considered useful: first, practitioners working with youth in these treatment programs will understand where their patients are likely coming from, and second, those working to get more at-risk youth in addiction treatment will be able to target those demographic factors that this study discovered a statistical significant link to help-seeking behavior.

For instance, experts can overlook factors like ethnicity, homelessness, and history of sexual abuse, which were not predictive of addiction treatment, in targeting individuals for these treatment programs. Instead, the experts should be focusing, based on the results of this study, on the predictive factors that were statistically significant: history of overdose, cocaine use, and so on. Analyzing this study is useful for a deeper understanding of social welfare to the extent that it is an examination of risk factors that officials can take a meaningful and significant step in