Beyond Matching Alone: Perceived Meaningfulness as a Complementary Pathway to Effective Juvenile Diversion

Abstract

The Risk–Need–Responsivity (RNR) model holds that services should match criminogenic needs, but the responsivity principle also contains a rarely examined receiver-side dimension: whether young people experience interventions as meaningful. Using a prospective longitudinal design, we followed 1,204 Chinese adolescents across 32 diversion program sites to examine whether perceived meaningfulness predicts recidivism beyond objective service–need matching and compensates for inadequate matching. Both pathways predicted recidivism. When entered simultaneously, initial meaningfulness (β = −.210) and matching (β = −.181) remained significant, whereas change in meaningfulness was only marginal ( p = .100). Simple slope analyses suggested that matching mattered primarily when meaningfulness was low, although the interaction did not reach conventional significance ( p = .055). An exploratory comparison did not support compensation: recidivism was 5.8% in the high-matching/low-meaningfulness group, compared with 7.4% in the low-matching/high-meaningfulness group. These findings incorporate young people’s subjective experiences of meaningfulness into the receiver-side understanding of responsivity, thereby extending the RNR model’s explanation of how diversion interventions produce effects.