Pragmatic screening for housing instability risk among court-involved youth

Abstract

Juvenile court contact offers an intervening point for preventing housing instability, but courts often lack resources for additional risk screeners. Leveraging data from assessment tools in practice like the Positive Achievement Change Tool (PACT) offers a pragmatic solution. This study explored the utility of PACT items for housing instability risk identification in N = 4291 court-involved youth. Regression and classification and regression tree analyses identified substance use, lack of parental control/supervision, poor school attendance, and physical abuse/neglect as predictors with high sensitivity, albeit low specificity. Practical implications of balancing false positives with the pragmatic value of a resource-efficient screening approach are discussed.