Issues to consider when predicting retention in therapeutic communities

Many studies have focused on retention in therapeutic communities (TCs) because research shows that retention is an important predictor of client outcomes from these programs. A comparison of the three largest studies found there was little overlap between predictors of retention in TCs. Treatment Outcome Prospective Study data were analyzed to assess whether these findings may have been due to differences in times when the data were collected, measures of length of stay, and domains of variables used to predict retention. While the results suggest that each of these factors contributed to some differences between predictors of retention, the predictors still were unable to explain more than a small amount of the variance in retention. Research indicates that other variables need to be taken into account if future studies are to be more successful in predicting retention in TCs.