Therapeutic Workplace: Article Analysis

In a study conducted by Silverman et al. (2002), the researchers were attempting to determine if long-term exposure to an intervention called the Therapeutic Workplace could maintain abstinence from drugs over an extended period of time. The first strength I notice from reading the article is that the study did not just hand out reinforcements to individuals, regardless of whether drugs were being used or not. The method used in this study allowed individuals to earn certain goods and services by teaching individuals workforce skills, contingent upon abstinence from drugs. By doing this, this method defeats the popular notion that drug users are given free rewards via welfare checks by instead having the participants both abstain from drug use and …show more content…
This is also useful for those who use drugs simply because they are bored, as working would fill up a person’s time and not allow them to have enough time to be bored. Yet another strength that is worthy of being mentioned is the fact that drug users had to submit to certain drug tests before they could work for vouchers. This meant that they were actually checked for drug use, beyond simply asking them if they had or had not engaged in the use of drugs, meaning that they had a very slim chance of getting away with doing drugs while participating in the intervention. An additional strength of the study is that individuals were taught skills for data entry positions, due to the fact that the participants had mostly said that they wanted to do office positions, but they did not have the skills to do so. By teaching these individuals skills related to a field in which they actually wanted to be in, this intervention had a much better chance at keeping participants engaged with the work they were