Promoting Parent Engagement in School-Based Preventive Intervention: Hybrid Intervention with Brief Face-to-Face and Internet Components

This presentation will describe initial results from a feasibility trial of an internet-enhanced preventive intervention for aggressive children and their parents. Despite positive outcome results for preadolescent intervention programs for aggressive children, such as the Coping Power program, substantial difficulties in the implementation of the programs have also been noted. A key implementation concern has been the difficulty in successfully engaging some parents and youth in preventive intervention, reducing their public health significance. The barrier-to-treatment model proposed by Kazdin and colleagues describes how key barriers to intervention engagement predicted premature intervention drop out. One central barrier is that intervention can be perceived by participants and practitioners to be too demanding and too lengthy. Given such concerns, it is imperative to develop focused treatment interventions that are as brief and user-friendly as possible. A meta-analysis has found encouraging indications that brief behavioral parent training interventions can be more effective than long ones. One such approach can involve computer-assisted interventions have rarely been used with substance abuse prevention programs that focus on targeted at-risk children, such as those with high rates of aggressive behavior.

A hybrid Coping Power program has been developed and is only 40% of the length of the full CP program. This school-based targeted prevention approach includes twelve child sessions delivered every other week over a six month period, seven parent group sessions, and internet accessible media components which participants will use between sessions. The internet-delivered programming includes some elements that are regular practice and homework features of the Coping Power, along with games and information content, and an animated cartoon series, the “Adventures of Captain Judgment.” To test the feasibility of this hybrid intervention, designed to enhance parent engagement in school-based prevention, 8 elementary schools were randomly assigned to Coping Power – Internet Enhanced (CP-IE) or to Control. In the first cohort, 48 children from these 8 schools were identified through teacher ratings as being in the top quartile for aggressive behavior. Preliminary examination of teacher BASC ratings of externalizing and internalizing behavior problems for these children indicates that there was relative improvement  from baseline to post-intervention for children in CP-IE versus those in Control (effect size of .2), suggesting this may be a promising approach to efficient, brief intervention. The planned presentation will also report on intervention effects on parent-reported and child-reported outcomes, and provide information about parental engagement in the information, including qualitative data from focus groups.