The National Youth Screening Assistance Project (NYSAP) maintains a database of all MAYSI-2 research. While NYSAP is able to keep track of all published articles, it is more difficult to find all dissertations, theses, and MAYSI-2 presentations. If you have presented or written on the MAYSI-2 and would like to share your research with NYSAP, we would greatly appreciate this and you can e-mail your research to: nysap@umassmed.edu in any form. Please let us know if you would mind having us put your research on our website or, if not the whole document, if you mind us putting your abstract on our site. Thank you for your assistance in helping us keep our MAYSI-2 research database up-to-date.
To download a copy of MAYSI-2 references, please click here.
National Norm Study MAYSI-2 Research
To download a copy of the new National Norms chapter, please click here.
The MAYSI-2 manual contains norms for both boys and girls on various MAYSI-2 scales. We also have additional National Norm tables available that look at the various points of access in the juvenile justice process. To see these addional tables click here. While the main MAYSI-2 norms are available in the MAYSI-2 manual, these additional tables that look at points in the juvenile justice process are not contained in the MAYSI-2 manual.
While the MAYSI-2 had previous norms, the newer, National Norm Study was published in March 2008. The citation for the journal publication is:
Vincent, G.M., Grisso, T., Terry, A., & Banks, S. (2008). Sex and race differences in mental health symptoms in juvenile justice: The MAYSI-2 national meta-analysis. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 47(3), 282-290.
In the summer of 2002, we began a study (with funding from the William T. Grant Foundation) that had two primary purposes: 1) to develop national norms for the MAYSI-2 to replace the Massachusetts-based norms, and 2) to address questions of scale differences according to age, gender, various ethnic backgrounds, thus improving juvenile justice systems’ abilities to use the instrument while taking those differences into account. Meta-analytic techniques were used to determine which differences among youths could be reliably expected across a large number of sites, and which of these differences varied too much across sites to be considered generally true for youths in juvenile justice programs nationally. Past single-site studies often have produced conflicting findings in this regard.
For this study we obtained MAYSI-2 case data from juvenile justice sites located in 19 states. The final data set totaled 70,423 cases from 283 different facilities. These included 141 intake probation offices from 7 states, 91 pretrial detention sites from 16 states, and 51 corrections sites from 12 states.
Our first question was whether the MAYSI-2 cut-off scores targeted similar percentages of youths as having clinically significant scale elevations in both the original Massachusetts sample and the national sample. In most cases, the proportion of youths in the original and national samples were not substantially different in proportion over the Caution or the Warning cutoffs. The only difference sufficient to warrant a change in the cut-off scores was the Warning cut-off for the Alcohol/Drug Use scale (ADU). This change has been incorporated in the new MAYSIWARE software program and the new manual. Current MAYSI-2 users should be aware that the ADU Warning cut-off has been lowered from a score of 7 to 6.
Results of the meta-analytic analysis revealed that girls in justice system intake and facilities have a much higher likelihood of scoring over the Caution cut-off than boys on most MAYSI-2 scales, and that this is a sufficiently reliable finding across sites to allow juvenile justice personnel to apply it in their own programs.
In contrast, applicable across sites in the U.S., there was a lack of differences on most scales between younger and older youths. The ADU scale was the notable exception. Boys were more likely to be elevated than girls at older ages (15 to 17 years), but at younger ages, boys and girls were equally as likely to report elevated ADU problems.
The study produced only limited insight into differences between ethnic groups in symptom reporting on the MAYSI-2. Only two results seemed clear and had special importance for work with juvenile justice youths. First, white youths were more likely to report suicide ideation than black youths, consistently across U.S. sites. Second, white youths were more likely to report problem levels of alcohol or drug use than were black youths. But the magnitude of that difference varied from small to substantial across U.S. sites, and the variables in our study could not locate a way to identify or explain differences across sites.
We reported the procedures and findings of the National Norm study in much greater detail in chapter 10 of the new MAYSI-2 manual. In addition, in the near future, we will be sending short regionalized reports of these findings to each juvenile justice contact who kindly donated data to this study.
