The Family Check Up and Adolescent Depression: An Examination of Treatment Nonresponders

Introduction:

The Family Check Up (FCU) is a parent-centered intervention for reducing children’s problem behavior through changing parent-child interactions. The FCU integrates comprehensive assessment tools with motivation enhancement strategies toward the goal of better engaging parents in parenting interventions. After the Family Check Up, Assessment and Feedback lead to parent skills training from our empirically based parent skills training curriculum called Everyday Parenting Curriculum. Although the FCU was originally designed to prevent conduct problems, we have also found the FCU to be effective in preventing adolescent depression.  The current analyses examine patterns of non-response to treatment, in an effort to extend our understanding of the factors that predict diminished response to family intervention.

Methods/ Results: This poster will present the effects of the Family Check Up intervention on adolescents’ depressed moods. In particular, we will examine patterns of non-response to intervention efforts, using data from two randomized trials: Project Alliance 1 involves 998 adolescents originally assessed and randomized at age 11 and followed through age 24.  The second intervention trial is Project Alliance 2, where youth were randomized at age 11 and followed to age 15. Prior work has documented significant effects of the FCU on reductions in depressive symptoms in both of these trials.  The current analyses will examine approaches to identifying youth for whom intervention did not appear to be effective.  We will use two approaches, including a traditional moderation approach to examine predictors of diminished intervention effects, and a growth mixture modeling approach to identify heterogeneous patterns of intervention response (including non-response).  Demographic (i.e. gender, ethnicity, parental marital status, and family income) and risk covariates (i.e. family conflict, antisocial behavior, and peer deviance) will be examined as possible predictors of treatment non-response.

Conclusions: While most prevention research focuses on examining positive responses to intervention, these analyses represent an important step towards the equally important goal of understanding youth who do not respond to intervention efforts.