A review of the effectiveness of recreation prevention and intervention efforts with at-risk and juvenile delinquent populations

Due to the character of the original source materials and the nature of batch digitization, quality control issues may be present in this document. Please report any quality issues you encounter to digital@library.tamu.edu, referencing the URI of the item.Includes bibliographical references.A segment of youth in society are considered at risk, and the number is increasing. At-risk youth are a problem to the extent that many of them become delinquents with a resulting high social and economic cost to the individuals and society. The use of recreation is often left out of the variety of services that have been suggested or utilized to help either prevent delinquency or intervene once the problems occur. Thus, the overall goal of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of recreation prevention and intervention efforts with at-risk and juvenile delinquent populations through an examination of theoretical and empirical research in the leisure, criminology, sociology, psychology, and education fields. This goal was achieved through the accomplishment of five purposes: develop a better understanding of the role recreation can play in the prevention of juvenile delinquency and the use of recreation as an intervention mechanism; identify key variables that are impacted by recreation; conceptualize the recreation impact construct; identify instrumentation used to measure key variables; and, identify limitations/issues in evaluation instrumentation. Specific outcomes of the study included: the development of a continuum describing youth from a position of risk to juvenile delinquency; the development of a taxonomy of possible domains based on the identified key variables; development of a taxonomy of existing theories and concepts used to explain delinquency; conceptualization of a model explaining the impact of recretain in delinquency prevention and intervention; and, the compilation and critique of an inventory of instruments used to measure recreation-delinquency variables. The results of the study provide a framework from which research in the area of youth-at-risk and delinquency and the use of recreation as a medium of prevention and/or intervention can be investigated