Resilience and Early Treatment Dropout in a Male Residential Substance Abuse Treatment Facility

Many people entering substance abuse treatment programs dropout early, but early dropout hurts their chances of recovery. Guided by the transtheoretical model of change, which posits that people come to therapy at different levels of readiness to change, the current study illustrated how resilience and other psychological variables may affect a client's likeliness to stay in a residential treatment facility for substance abuse. The hypothesis for this study was that resilience would predict both early treatment dropout and treatment effectiveness within 30 days. Archival records were reviewed of 85 clients who participated in the Salvation Army Adult Substance Abuse Rehabilitation program from 2006 through 2009. A logistic regression analysis was run; Mann-Whitney U and Kruskal-Wallis H tests were applied to significant dependent variables. Data analyses revealed that resilience and being legally mandated to treatment were statistically significant predictors of early treatment dropout. These findings have implications for positive social change in that they will assist treatment facilities by increasing their knowledge regarding factors that may promote early treatment dropout.