Short‐ and Long‐Term Outcome Results from a Multisite Evaluation of the G.R.E.A.T. Program

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12048
• Published date: 01 August 2013
• Date: 01 August 2013

RESEARCH ARTICLE

EVALUATION OF THE G.R.E.A.T.

PROGRAM

Short- and Long-Term Outcome Results

from a Multisite Evaluation of the

G.R.E.A.T. Program

Finn-Aage Esbensen

University of Missouri—St. Louis

D. WayneOsgood

Pennsylvania State University

Dana Peterson

University at Albany

TerranceJ. Taylor and Dena C. Carson

University of Missouri—St. Louis

Youth gangs continue to garner substantial attention from the media, public, and

academic researchers as a result, in large part, of the violence attributed to gang

members. Several prevention, intervention, and suppression programs have been

introduced to address problems associated with youth gangs, but to date, relatively few have

been deemed as promising, let alone as effective (e.g., Esbensen, Freng, Taylor, Peterson,

and Osgood, 2002; Howell, 2012; Klein and Maxson, 2006; Maxson, Egley, Miller, and

Klein, 2013; Reed and Decker, 2002).

Given the disruptive influence that gangs pose on school safety and academic perfor-

mance (as well as on communities), gangs and associated violence are targets of prevention

This research was made possible, in part, by the support and participation of seven school districts, including

the School District of Philadelphia. This project was supported by Award No. 2006-JV-FX-0011 from the

National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. The opinions, findings, and

conclusions or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily

reflect the views of the Department of Justice or of the seven participating school districts. We would like to

express our appreciation to the students who made this project possible by completing the student

questionnaires. And this project would have been impossible without our team of colleagues and research

assistants; special thanks to Adrienne Freng, Kristy Matsuda, J. Michael Vecchio, and Stephanie A. Wiley for

their invaluable assistance. Direct correspondence to Finn-Aage Esbensen, Department of Criminology and

Criminal Justice, University of Missouri—St. Louis, One University Blvd., St. Louis, MO 63121-4499 (e-mail:

esbensen@umsl.edu).

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12048 C2013 American Society of Criminology 375

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 12 rIssue 3

Research Article Evaluation of the G.R.E.A.T. Program

and intervention efforts. Several programs have been developed and promoted as “effective,”

and school administrators often are confronted with slick promotional materials advocating

the “wonderfulness” of a wide array of programs claiming they will either reduce problem

behaviors, increase social skills, promote positive youth behavior, or all of the above.When-

ever possible, these school administrators should be encouraged to choose programs with a

history of evaluation findings supporting program effectiveness. Although many programs

exist, few have been subjected to rigorous program evaluations. Of particular importance

is the lack of programs subjected to randomized control trials (RCTs). The current study

presents one example of short- and long-term findings from a recent RCT assessing the

effectiveness of a gang-prevention program—–Gang Resistance Education and Training

(G.R.E.A.T.). The findings from this study can aid recent efforts to provide empirically

based information to school administrators and community leaders seeking to implement

evidence-supported programs.

Despite the relative absence of the most rigorous evaluation designs (i.e., RCTs) assess-

ing gang-prevention programs, an increasing number of agencies/organizations has devel-

oped criteria for classifying programs into various categories ranging from “not effective”

to “effective” or “model” programs based on the findings of empirical evaluations. For

example, the Blueprints Series (Mihalic, Fagan, Irwin, Ballard, and Elliott, 2002; Mihalic

and Irwin, 2003) identifies model violence-prevention programs that have withstood rig-

orous scientific evaluations, and the Maryland Report (Sherman et al., 1997) assessed the

effectiveness of a broad range of projects. In 2005, the Helping America’s Youth (HAY)

Community Guide (Howell, 2009) rated programs identified by nonfederal agencies on

three levels: Level 1 (exemplary or model programs based on evaluation designs of the

“highest quality”), Level 2 (effective programs based on quasi-experimental research), and

Level 3 (promising programs). Similarly, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency

Prevention provides a listing of exemplary, effective, or promising programs (OJJDP, 2010),

and in 2010, the National Institute of Justice introduced its “Crime Solutions” website,

which identifies effective and promising programs (crimesolutions.gov).

Of particular relevance to the current study,the G.R.E.A.T. program is currently rated

as “promising” by OJJDP and by Crime Solutions, and it is designated as Level 2 (ef-

fective) in the Helping America’s Youth rating scale (findyouthinfo.gov). Additionally, a

recent systematic review found that the G.R.E.A.T. program was one of only a handful of

gang-awareness programs meeting strict guidelines for determining program effectiveness

(Gravel, Bouchard, Descormiers, Wong, and Morselli, 2013). These designations were ini-

tially based on findings from two multisite evaluations of the “original”program curriculum:

one cross-sectional study conducted in 1995 (Esbensen and Osgood, 1999) and one lon-

gitudinal study conducted between 1995 and 1999 (Esbensen, Osgood, Taylor, Peterson,

and Freng, 2001), but the current classifications are based on short-term findings from an

evaluation of the revised G.R.E.A.T. program (Esbensen, Peterson, Taylor, and Osgood,

2012).

376 Criminology & Public Policy

Esbensen et al.

The G.R.E.A.T. program has been in existence since 1991 and has received some

acclaim since its inception. Originally developed as a nine-lesson curriculum based on Drug

Abuse Resistance Education (DARE), the program underwent a substantial curriculum

revision after the findings of the two aforementioned studies. Once these revisions were

made, there was considerable interest in determining whether the program would be found to

be more effective at meeting program goals than was the case in the evaluations of the original

G.R.E.A.T.program. In a recent publication, we reported on the 1-year posttreatment effects

of the revised G.R.E.A.T. program (Esbensen et al., 2012). This article provides an overview

of those results but focuses on the long-term program effects (up to 4 years posttreatment)

while reporting additional analyses that examine (a) site-specific program outcomes and

(b) the extent to which preexisting risk factors impact program effectiveness. Our findings

contribute to the sparse body of knowledge about effective gang-prevention strategies.

We begin with a description of the G.R.E.A.T. program. Next, we turn to a recap

of findings from previous evaluations, with a particular emphasis on critiques levied at

both the program and the evaluation findings, and how the current program and evaluation

overcome many of the limitations highlighted previously.We then describe the methodology

employed and the results of the current evaluation of the revised G.R.E.A.T. program. We

conclude with a discussion of how the current results fit with those of previous evaluations

and what this means for gang-prevention programming.

G.R.E.A.T.Program1

The G.R.E.A.T. program is a school-based gang- and violence-prevention program with

three primary goals:

(1) To teach youth to avoid gang membership

(2) To prevent violence and criminal activity

(3) To assist youth in developing positive relationships with law enforcement.

Developed as a universal prevention program targeting youth in early adolescence (i.e., 6th

or 7th graders), the G.R.E.A.T. program was classified as a gang-awareness program in a

recent review of gang programs (Gravel et al., 2013). The original G.R.E.A.T. program,

developed by Phoenix-area police departments in 1991, was a cognitive-based program that

taught students about crime and its effect on victims, cultural diversity, conflict resolution

skills, meeting basic needs (without a gang), responsibility, and goal setting.2,3 Uniformed

1. This section describing the G.R.E.A.T. program is partially excerpted from Esbensen et al. (2012).

2. The core program component of G.R.E.A.T. is its middle-school curriculum, and often this is what is

referred to with the term “G.R.E.A.T. program.” Other optional components of G.R.E.A.T. are an

elementary-school curriculum, a summer program, and G.R.E.A.T. Families.

3. For a detailed account of the political context surrounding the development of the original G.R.E.A.T.

program, consult Winfree, Peterson Lynskey, and Maupin (1999).

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