Future directions in residential treatment outcome research

Future outcome research on residential treatment will be influenced positively by major trends in the helping professions. These trends include the transfer of empirically supported interventions into the residential treatment setting, the targeting of specific problems or disorders that burden children and adolescents,and more sophisticated tests of positive and negative outcomes. It is also likely that future research will use recent developments in statistics that permit study of trajectories of change in children or adolescents before, during, and after residential treatment. Continued emphasis must be placed on improving and studying postresidential transitions, comparing residential to less restrictive models of treatment, and qualitative investigations of successful and unsuccessful cases.