Testing an Interactionist Theory of Treatment Engagement in a Prison-Based Therapeutic Community
Open Access
- Author:
- Davidson, Kimberly Marie
- Graduate Program:
- Criminology
- Degree:
- Master of Arts
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- August 17, 2017
- Committee Members:
- Derek Kreager, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Jeremy Staff, Committee Member
Jeffery Ulmer, Committee Member - Keywords:
- substance use
therapeutic community
symbolic interactionism - Abstract:
- The prison-based therapeutic community (TC) is a promising drug and alcohol treatment program that emphasizes sobriety and desistance through group interaction and individual responsibility. While program evaluations have demonstrated positive results, the cognitive, behavioral, and social processes that define the prison-based TC, processes that ultimately separate those who desist from those who relapse, are largely absent from prior research. In particular, the TC model rests on the assumption that residents increase their treatment engagement and willingness to change through peer interactions and positive role modeling, but this social interactionist process has received virtually no research attention. TC-PINS (Therapeutic Community Prison Inmate Network Study) data collected over ten months captures self appraisals, reflected appraisals, and peer appraisals of resident willingness to change, tracing alignment of those appraisals over time in treatment. In this thesis, I explore peer-driven mechanisms of the TC model by examining the alignment of residents’ appraisals over time and by predicting within-person changes in treatment engagement by changes in the appraisal measures. Results suggest that self, peer, and reflected appraisals tend to converge over time and that changes in reflected appraisals are most predictive of changes in treatment engagement over time in treatment. Such results, consistent with a symbolic interactionist perspective, inform prison-based treatment programming and contribute to research on individual-level trajectories of desistance and substance use recovery.