The study will demonstrate how delivery of motivational/coaching messages to justice-involved youth and their caregivers will lead to greater youth substance use treatment attendance and engagement. The study will start with identifying the feasibility and acceptability of the SMS text-messaging intervention with community-supervised justice-involved youth. Then, the study will determine whether the tailored dyadic (youth and caregiver) "SMS text-messaging plus" intervention (appointment reminder texts plus motivational message texts) improves youth substance use or dual diagnosis treatment attendance and engagement relative to the "SMS text messaging" comparison (only appointment reminder texts). Finally, the study will characterize patterns of key justice and behavioral health system-level factors that promote or hinder eventual adoption and sustainability of mHealth technology as a tool to improve treatment attendance for justice-involved youth.
