A Police Partnership Targeting Truancy: Study Protocol for a Cluster Randomised Controlled Trial
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A Police Partnership Targeting Truancy: Study Protocol for a Cluster Randomised Controlled Trial Lorraine Mazerolle 1,2 & Sarah Bennett 1,2 & Stephanie M. Cardwell 2,3 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Research Question How can an Australian police agency best test its role in a truancy prevention programme that can help to prevent crime? Data Operational and analytic planning for testing the Ability School Engagement Partnership (ASEP) programme in Queensland that aims to increase school attendance and reduce anti-social behaviour, including offending. Methods Fulfilling the requirements for registering a randomised trial protocol with the Clinicaltrials.gov Registry (NCT04281966; date registered 24 February 2020). Findings A protocol deploying a cluster randomised trial offers sufficient statistical power to detect a moderately large effect size as statistically significant with 80% probability. Conclusion Implementation of this protocol as planned would provide an internally valid test of the effectiveness of the ASEP programme in real-world conditions. Keywords Truancy . Crime prevention . Police partnerships . Schools . Delinquency .
School attendance . Antisocial behaviour . Protocol . Randomised controlled cluster trial
Introduction Truancy is a problematic behaviour associated with negative outcomes including antisocial behaviour. The current study involves the scaling up and evaluation of the
* Lorraine Mazerolle [email protected]
1
Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course, Indooroopilly, Queensland, Australia
2
School of Social Science, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, Australia
3
Department of Criminology & Criminal Justice, The University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA
Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing
Ability School Engagement Partnership (ASEP) programme, a partnership between police and schools designed to increase parental knowledge of the education laws as a means to help young people re-engage with school and reduce their antisocial behaviour. The ASEP programme involves a series of scripted communications between police, school representatives, parents and their child who is truanting. The communications culminate in an ASEP conference designed to identify the underlying causes for a child’s non-attendance at school and communicate, in a procedurally fair way, the legal requirements for parents to ensure their child attends school. This scientific communication presents the study protocol for evaluating ASEP in a cluster randomised trial. The protocol provides the ground rules for testing the effectiveness of the ASEP programme among high school-aged young people with less than 85% school attendance (ages 12 to 16) in South East Queensland. The protocol proposes a randomised controlled cluster trial in which high schools are randomly assigned to either experimental or control status. Students from the control schools will receive the business-as-usual approach to handling school non-a
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