Keywords

Adolescent delinquency, substance abuse, health concern

Abstract

This meta-analysis summarizes results from k = 24 studies comparing either BriefStrategic Family Therapy, Functional Family Therapy, Multidimensional Family Therapy,or Multisystemic Therapy to either treatment-as-usual, an alternative therapy, or a controlgroup in the treatment of adolescent substance abuse and delinquency. Additionally, theauthors reviewed and applied three advanced meta-analysis methods including influenceanalysis, multivariate meta-analysis, and publication bias analyses. The results suggestedthat as a group the four family therapies had statistically significant, but modest effects ascompared to treatment-as-usual (d= 0.21;k= 11) and as compared to alternative thera-pies (d= 0.26;k= 11). The effect of family therapy compared to control was larger(d= 0.70;k= 4) but was not statistically significant probably because of low power.There was insufficient evidence to determine whether the various models differed in theireffectiveness relative to each other. Influence analyses suggested that three studies had alarge effect on aggregate effect sizes and heterogeneity statistics. Moderator and multivari-ate analyses were largely underpowered but will be useful as this literature grows.