Interventions for Juvenile Offenders: A Serendipitous Journey

• Author: Mark W. Lipsey
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12067
• Published date: 01 February 2014
• Date: 01 February 2014

VOLLMER AWARD ADDRESS

VOLLMER AWARD

Interventions for Juvenile Offenders:

A Serendipitous Journey

Mark W.Lipsey

Peabody Research Institute, Vanderbilt University

This is a story of a concatenation of largely unplanned and unexpected events that

propelled a line of research on the effectiveness of interventions for juvenile offenders

along a trajectory that is more coherent in retrospect than at the time of any of those

events. In the course of that serendipitousjourney, insights were gained on the limitations

of individual studies, the value of systematic analysis of a body of research, and the

challenges of transporting evidence into evidence-based practice.

Robert Martinson’s infamous “nothing works” paper was published in 1974, fol-

lowed by the massive Lipton, Martinson, and Wilks (1975) review of research on

rehabilitation programs for offenders that gave credence to that conclusion. But

I knew nothing of that at the time. I certainly had no inkling of how much the misinter-

pretation of research findings in that work would influence my own research over the next

several decades. Only a few years out of a graduate psychology program, my commitment

was to the newly emerging field of program evaluation research. The first textbooks in

program evaluation had appeared about that time (Rossi and Williams, 1972; Weiss,1972)

along with new journals and professional organizations that helped define the study of the

effectiveness of social programs as a distinct area of inquiry. A new role for social scientists

was developing that offered the opportunity to conduct a form of applied research that

might very directly help solve pressing social problems.

For a young methodologically oriented psychologist, the perspective that revealed the

pathway into this new field came from Donald Campbell. The Campbell and Stanley

volume, Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Research (1963), and the follow-

up volume by Cook and Campbell, Quasi-Experimentation: Design & Analysis Issues for Field

Settings (1979), not only catalogued a range of research designs for assessing the effects of

Direct correspondence to Mark W. Lipsey, Peabody Research Institute, Vanderbilt University, 230 Appleton

Place, PMB 181, Nashville, TN 37203 (e-mail: mark.lipsey@vanderbilt.edu).

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12067 C2014 American Society of Criminology 1

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 13 rIssue 1