Psychology week 7 assignment

1

Evaluating Tides’ Home-Based Youth Program

Barbara Maclure

Dr. Kelly

Due date11/09/2025

Introduction

This introductory section presents the social and behavioral problem that justifies evaluation, identifies the specific program within the agency that will be examined, states clearly articulated assumptions where agency materials are incomplete, and specifies the single outcome that the evaluation will address. The structure follows the week-two template supplied in class: a problem statement supported by recent and credible statistics, a focused description of one program rather than an agency-wide overview, an explicit list of assumptions to cover missing operational details, and a single-sentence evaluation aim.

The problem

Recent United States surveillance data indicate a sustained mental-health burden among adolescents. The 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey reported that almost forty per cent of high-school students experienced persistent sadness or hopelessness that interfered with usual activities, signaling a level of distress that can impair learning, family relationships, and self-regulation (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2024). Within Rhode Island, educational monitoring has documented chronic absenteeism rates of approximately twenty-two to twenty-five per cent, meaning that about one in four students is missing ten per cent or more of the school year and is therefore at increased risk of academic failure, disengagement, and school discipline (Rhode Island KIDS COUNT, 2024). When elevated depressive symptoms and chronic absenteeism co-occur, the likelihood rises that young people will be present in crisis and that schools or community systems will be required to mobilize intensive responses.

This constellation of problems disproportionately affects children and adolescents aged six to twenty-one who reside in neighborhoods marked by economic stressors, unstable housing, or limited transport. For these families, traditional office-based behavioral-health care can be inaccessible or fragmented, which allows symptoms to escalate. If depressive symptoms and school refusal remain unaddressed, the consequences typically include emergency-department utilization, short-term out-of-home placement, heightened supervision by child-welfare or juvenile-justice agencies, and ultimately higher public expenditure. In program-evaluation terms, these characteristics define a problem that is prevalent, costly, and clearly linked to wellbeing and safety, and therefore suitable for an evaluation aimed at detecting client-level change.

The program

Tides Family Services is a Rhode Island nonprofit organization that delivers “no-walls,” community-embedded services to at-risk youth aged six to twenty-one, with availability twenty-four hours a day and three hundred sixty-five days a year. Its mission is to keep young people safely at home, in school and in their communities through strengths-based, family-focused intervention (Tides Family Services, n.d.). For evaluation purposes, it is necessary to narrow attention to a single program rather than the full agency portfolio. The program selected for this report is the home- and community-based behavioral-health service. This service targets youths who are present with emotional or behavioral disorders, school problems, or family disruption. Staff provide mobile, community-based contacts; coordinate with school personnel when attendance or behavior is a concern; and increase contact frequency during periods of risk so that families do not have to default to emergency or residential care. This configuration is consistent with published evidence showing that intensive home treatment for children and adolescents can achieve clinical improvements comparable to inpatient care while allowing young people to remain with their families, thereby reducing disruption and stigma (Graf, Sigrist, Boege, et al., 2024).

From an evaluation perspective, describing the program at this level of specificity is essential because it links day-to-day activities to the outcome selected in Section Three. The week-two materials emphasized that funders are no longer satisfied with tallies of counselling hours or home visits; they expect documentation that the service configuration plausibly produces symptom relief or improved functioning for the identified population. By specifying that the program is mobile, family-involved and coordinated with schools, the present report establishes a clear causal pathway: intensive support in the home reduces emotional distress, which in turn makes regular school attendance more attainable. Making this pathway explicit at the outset allows later sections of the full report to select measures, time points and analytic strategies that are logically consistent with the program’s design appropriately.

Assumptions

Since publicly available Tides Family Services materials do not supply a complete service manual, the following reasonable assumptions are stated explicitly, in line with the week-two instructions.

First, clients enrolled in the home- and community-based behavioral-health program receive at least one planned direct contact per week, with additional visits or calls provided during crises or periods of clinical deterioration, so that support remains continuous.

Second, caregivers or other key family members are expected to participate in sessions so that skills, safety plans, and behavioral strategies are reinforced in the natural environment and not only during practitioner visits.

Third, where school attendance or behavior is part of the presenting problem, program staff initiate communication with school personnel to support re-engagement and to monitor progress. These assumptions are compatible with the agency’s description of services as “no-walls” and with common practice in intensive home-based models, and they make it possible to frame the evaluation even in the absence of full procedural detail.

The evaluation

This program evaluation will assess the effectiveness of the Tides Family Services home- and community-based behavioral-health program by determining whether there is a significant reduction in adolescent depressive symptoms between intake and six months of service.

References

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2024). 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey results. https://www.cdc.gov/yrbs/results/2023-yrbs-results.html

Graf, D., Sigrist, C., Boege, I., et al. (2024). Effectiveness of home treatment in children and adolescents with psychiatric disorders: Systematic review and meta-analysis. BMC Medicine, 22, 241. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-024-03448-2

Rhode Island KIDS COUNT. (2024). Chronic absence, middle school and high school. https://rikidscount.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/chronic-absence-middle-school-and-high-school_fb2024.pdf

Tides Family Services. (n.d.). Home. https://www.tidesfs.org/