Dr. Keith Warren of the OSU College of Social Work and co-investigator Dr. Ciriyam Jayaprakash of the OSU Department of Physics were awarded a prestigious research grant from the National Institute of Drug Abuse, a member of the National Institutes of Health.
Dr. Keith Warren conducts critically needed research on therapeutic communities (TC) with the goal of helping TC clinicians improve client outcomes. However, research on TC treatment is a daunting task. TCs rely on the interactions between residents as the primary method of treatment. The fundamental TC process questions’how do residents maintain cooperation with each other, how do interactions give rise to a helping community, and how do interactions predict outcomes’cannot be answered through analysis of individual traits. Analysis must extend to thousands of interactions between residents.
Dr. Warren’s study is based on a partnership between Ohio State University researchers and five Ohio corrections-based TCs. In an attempt to assure accountability and fidelity to standards of TC treatment (De Leon, 2000), the five Ohio TCs have recorded several hundred thousand incidents of helping behavior in agency databases. These records include givers and recipients of helping behavior as well as dates. They can therefore be analyzed as a social network. The analysis of the network aims to understand the way in which residents maintain cooperation within the TCs, the relationship between network characteristics and outcomes, and the overall community structure that arises through resident interactions.
An appealing aspect of studying the cooperative behavior of TC residents is that such behavior is amenable to clinical intervention. It is therefore expected that this study will result in concrete suggestions for the improvement of TC clinical outcomes.
Dr. Warren extends thanks to the following Ohio institutions with which he is partnering to conduct this important study: West Central Col Community Correctional Facility, River City Correctional Center, MonDay Community Correctional Institution, STAR Community Justice Center, NorthWest Community Corrections Center, and the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.