ASR, part of the study, was also charged by the state of MA with abusing kids. MBA was shut down. Kids were abused and died in other programs in the study. All it says is that abused kids are likely to self-report improvement in order to escape the program and the abuse. It's called "sample bias" and this study is rife with it, and the study itself calls out its own bias.
The main conclusion of the study is that abusing kids is effective in making them say they are well to make it stop. No control group, no follow up, no peer review, no oversight of program b-mod procedures, nothing.
These kids could be made to self report improvement just by beating them daily until they said what Whooter wanted them to. He'd then claim "success" without discussing his methods, like this garbage study does.