Mentoring to reduce substance use for youth in the juvenile justice system

The purpose of this K24 MidCareer Investigator Award is to renew support for Dr. Marina Tolou-Shams, a child clinical psychologist who, since 2007, has led a program of research and mentorship in the areas of substance use and psychiatric needs for youth involved in the legal system (YILS). This candidate proposes to utilize K24 renewal support to a) expand technology-based substance use services and treatment research among YILS with particular emphasis on understanding ways that technology-based interventions with settings in contact with YILS could boost referrals to substance use treatment services and b) through the K24 candidate’s mentoring program continue to mentor junior PhD and MD researchers in rapidly moving the youth substance use services and treatment science forward, with emphasis on AI-driven technological approaches to augmenting services provision. Taking advantage of a rich institutional environment, the candidate will continue to leverage expert interdisciplinary collaborators and expand to new areas, including computational sciences, to ensure that she and her mentees will be on the cutting edge of digital behavioral health research with youth populations. Digital mobile health (mHealth) technologies have been increasingly demonstrated as an efficacious, low-cost way of engaging people into and/or delivering quality care. Over the past five years, there have been significant advances in the efficacy of adolescent mobile health interventions to improve substance use and psychiatric outcomes; however, research suggests that legal systems in contact with youth, such as juvenile probation departments, are slower to adopt, implement and maintain technology-based interventions, even if they can support connection to services for eligible youth. Dr. Tolou-Shams’ research project aims to gain a single, large statewide understanding of juvenile probation staff substance use services’ attitudes, perceptions, and practices that will incorporate technology use-related items. Survey data will inform development of a behavioral nudge SMS text intervention with juvenile probation staff to test whether AI-driven technology may be useful in changing key attitudes and practices around youth substance use treatment referrals and linkage. This renewed K24 research and protected time for mentoring will lead to ways in which the field will broadly learn about approaches to developing, testing and implementing novel technology-based interventions for adolescent substance use treatment services across various points in the cascade of care (e.g., screening, referral).