Youth involved in the juvenile justice system are at elevated risk for suicide and co-occurring mental health symptoms. This study aims to examine the suicide risk and treatment needs of court-involved, non-incarcerated (CINI) youth, and to understand the acceptability and effectiveness of implementing a mental health screening procedure at time of first court contact. By embedding a forensic mental health screening tool into the intake process of a family court diversionary program, a total of 891 youth (aged 12-18) were assessed using the Massachusetts Youth Screening Instrument-2 (MAYSI-2). Analysis of screening responses revealed 12.5% of youth indicated risk for suicide with risk levels differentiated by youth sex, race and ethnicity. Suicide ideation was also significantly associated with flagging, an indication of clinical risk, on all other scales of the MAYSI-2, as well as subsequent referrals to treatment. Screening for suicide at first point of court contact within an existing diversionary program may serve as a critical and effective point of intervention for youth in need.

Latinx adolescents are overrepresented in the justice system and have high untreated behavioral health needs. We examined the family as well as promotive and inhibitive environments (i.e., neighborhood and school) and their associations on behavioral health among 181 first-time justice-involved Latinx adolescents. Results showed that more optimal caregiver-adolescent attachment was associated with fewer behavioral health needs; more negative caregiver-adolescent communication with greater behavioral health needs. Increased neighborhood disadvantage and negative school interactions served as inhibitive environments and were associated with greater behavioral health needs. Moderation analyses indicated that negative communication was associated with greater behavioral health needs among dyads with large acculturation differences but not for dyads close in acculturation. Findings underscore the need to assess the family relationships and communication, promotive/inhibitive environments, and acculturation differences when determining how to meet behavioral health needs among justice-involved Latinx adolescents.

Machine learning models that automatically assess reasoning quality are trained on human-annotated written products. These “gold-standard” corpora are typically created by prompting annotators to choose, using a forced choice design, which of two products presented side by side is the most convincing, contains the strongest evidence or would be adopted by more people. Despite the increase in popularity of using a forced choice design for assessing quality of reasoning (QoR), no study to date has established the validity and reliability of such a method. In two studies, we simultaneously presented two products of reasoning to participants and asked them to identify which product was ‘better justified’ through a forced choice design. We investigated the criterion validity and inter-rater reliability of the forced choice protocol by assessing the relationship between QoR, measured using the forced choice protocol, and accuracy in objectively answerable problems using naive raters sampled from MTurk (Study 1) and experts (Study 2), respectively. In both studies products that were closer to the correct answer and products generated by larger teams were consistently preferred. Experts were substantially better at picking the reasoning products that corresponded to accurate answers. Perhaps the most surprising finding was just how rapidly raters made judgements regarding reasoning: On average, both novices and experts made reliable decisions in under 15 seconds. We conclude that forced choice is a valid and reliable method of assessing QoR.