Parenting Interventions Going Global: Multi-Level Meta-Analysis on the Effectiveness of Transported and ‘Home Grown' Parenting Interventions to Reduce Disruptive Child Behavior

Parenting interventions are increasingly implemented as the key strategy to prevent and treat disruptive child behavior. This has led to a wide dissemination of interventions that are proven effective in their country of origin. Interventions are often transported to countries that may or may not have different economic and cultural characteristics. The extent to which these country characteristics affect program effectiveness is unknown. An alternative to importing packaged-deal or ‘branded’ interventions is to locally develop interventions that are based on the same underlying theory (e.g., usually social learning theory) as established interventions, but that are specifically designed to fit the needs of families within a specific country. Although evidence accumulates that both approaches (i.e., importing interventions and locally developing interventions) can be successful in improving family dynamics and child behavior, many questions surround the use of these different approaches and it is unknown which approach is generally—or depending on which program or country factors—most successful.

This systematic review and multilevel meta-analysis focuses on how effective parenting interventions are across countries. We include 180 randomized controlled trials that evaluate social learning theory-based parenting interventions to reduce behavioral problems in children aged 2-11. This review aims to distinguish between the effectiveness of transported ‘branded’ interventions and locally developed interventions. Two research questions are central: (1) how does the effectiveness of transported interventions in their new countries compare to the effectiveness of interventions in their countries of origin? and (2) how does the effectiveness of imported interventions compare to the effectiveness of locally developed interventions?

We use multilevel meta-analysis, which is an extension of ‘standard’ pairwise analyses to account for the correlation of the outcomes of different intervention trials with each other due to specific shared characteristics. Multilevel meta-analysis allows us to compare within classes of interventions that are related in some way (e.g., brands like Incredible Years and Triple-P), and produces more robust within-class comparisons by borrowing information from between classes.

Results will be available in December 2014. Based on our previous work on the transportability of parenting interventions, we expect parenting interventions in their new countries to be generally equally effective as parenting interventions in their countries of origin and expect imported parenting interventions to be generally equally effective as locally developed parenting interventions.