Intensive home-based programs for youth with serious emotional disturbances: A comprehensive review of experimental findings

Intensive home-based programs for youth with serious emotional disturbances operate in nearly every state and occupy a critical position in the continuum of care: the threshold between community retention and institutional placement. Despite their ubiquity and in contrast to research on home-based interventions for other populations, there is a relative dearth of empirical findings describing the efficacy of such interventions with youth with serious emotional disturbances and their families. The present paper offers a comprehensive review of experimental and quasi-experimental studies in this field. Taken together, the results of these studies suggest that intensive home-based interventions can effectively improve children's emotional and behavioral impairment, particularly from caregivers' perspectives. Involving state partners in large-scale, multi-outcome studies may further elucidate mechanisms of change and establish benchmarks that allow for more conclusive comparisons between treatment alternatives.