The five-domains approach can reveal the logic behind behaviors that may look like nothing more than teenage recklessness or delinquency. “All behavior meets a need,” Linda Snyder, a deputy juvenile officer in the family services unit of the St. Louis County Family Court, said. “So whether that behavior is adaptive or maladaptive, you have to understand the need it is filling.”

A juvenile, she said, may persist with behaviors that keep her in detention because it meets her need for safety better than being at home. Or a student may continue cursing out a teacher because getting kicked out of class serves to avoid the embarrassment of having to read in front of his peers. Or a youth who uses drugs may do so mainly to satisfy the need for social connectedness.

“At the end of the day, negative consequences don’t change behavior,” Ms. Snyder said. “Change comes through teaching competencies, and incentivizing and celebrating accomplishments. What the Full Frame does is teaches a process for developing interventions that are going to create competencies that will decrease the likelihood that kids will continue to be system involved.”

The officers in the family court can act with confidence on their insights because they are working in a system where everyone shares a common language, Mr. Burkemper said.

In Massachusetts, the Full Frame Initiative has been working for eight years with five state agencies, with the goal of preventing survivors of domestic and sexual violence from becoming, or remaining, homeless. “Often for victims of domestic violence, there’s a forced trade-off,” said Tammy Mello, the former executive director of the Governor’s Council to Address Sexual and Domestic Violence in Massachusetts.

Several years ago, Ms. Mello and other department heads who focused on children and families, transitional assistance, housing and homelessness, public health and victims’ assistance began meeting periodically to figure out how their systems could become better aligned. In particular, they wanted to stop making things harder for people who were trying to stabilize their lives.

For example, if a mother experiencing domestic violence lost temporary custody of her children because the child welfare department determined that they had to be removed for safety, it would automatically trigger her loss of housing benefits. “It was crazy,” Ms. Mello said. “Then you couldn’t return the kids to the mom because she’d lost her housing. And the mother would say, ‘I can’t get housing assistance unless I have my kids back.’”