Study
Millenky and colleagues (2011) evaluated the National Guard ChalleNGe Program, a residential intervention designed for high school dropouts. To be eligible for the program, youths must have dropped out or been expelled from school and be unemployed, drug free, not currently on probation or parole for anything beyond juvenile status offenses, and not convicted of a felony or capital offense. Youths were recruited for the study through 10 participating program sites in California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin. The sites were not randomly selected. Instead, the programs that reported stable staffing and tendency to receive more applicants than they could serve were chosen for the evaluation.
The baseline sample included 3,074 participants, recruited in 18 incoming class cycles from 2005 to 2007. During the study period, random assignment was conducted for a class cycle at a given program site only if the number of qualified applicants was at least 25 greater than the number needed to meet the site’s graduation goal. Participants were randomly assigned to either the ChalleNGe program (2,320 youths) or a waitlist control group (754 youths). A greater number of youths were assigned to the program group than the control group because the primary goal was to fill the number of available program slots.
Follow-up assessments took place at 6, 12, 24, and 36 months after the baseline assessment. Of those who were assigned to the intervention condition, 82 percent completed the 2-week PreChalleNGe phase and 53 percent graduated from the Residential Phase. In addition, 56 percent of all youths in the intervention group reported that they were still in contact with their mentors at the 36-month follow-up.
A subsample of youths was randomly drawn to complete the 36-month survey. This subsample included 1,173 youths, with 722 youths in the program group and 451 youths in the control group. The final composition of this subsample was 42.3 percent white, 33.8 percent African American or Black, 18.1 percent Hispanic, and 5.7 percent other races/ethnicities. The majority of the youths were male (88 percent), and slightly more than half (53.3 percent) were 17 years old.
At the time of random assignment, for the subsample assessed at 36 months, there were no differences between youths in the intervention group and control group on their demographic characteristics, levels of academic achievement, or physical health. However, youths in the intervention group were less likely to receive public assistance and were more likely to have used drugs or alcohol and to have been arrested or convicted of a crime in their lifetime, compared with youths in the control group. The study compared treatment and control groups at the beginning of the intervention and again at the 36-month follow-up.
The regression models were used to test for program effects and were weighted to account for differences across sites in sample size, survey response rate, and program versus control group ratio. The regression analyses also controlled for demographic characteristics (gender, race, and age), highest grade completed at study baseline, whether the participant lived in a two-parent household, and whether the participant applied to the ChalleNGe program because of interest in the military. Pooled estimates of adjusted means were reported in the evaluation. Outcome measures were youths’ self-report measures of their employment status, having earned a high school diploma or GED, involvement in any productive activity (vocational training, for example), number of arrests, delinquent behavior, illegal drug use (other than marijuana, such as LSD, cocaine, crystal meth, amphetamines, and heroin), marijuana use, and psychological distress.