Session: Developing and Testing Online Interventions for Family Adjustment: Independent and Blended Modalities (Society for Prevention Research 25th Annual Meeting)

With delivery costs associated with intensive behavioral interventions, coupled with an increase of Internet access within schools and American households; there has also been a corresponding increase in the need for effective “interactive” web-based interventions. It is increasingly critical for the field of prevention science to better understand the balance between being too intensive (too costly but effective) and too brief (less expensive but ineffective). The goal of this session is to present a series of innovative adaptations of evidence-based family interventions that were designed for online delivery. Each program was tailored for at-risk populations using a variety of approaches (i.e., in person training with online coaching, online training only, or comparative effectiveness among modalities). Each research group has similar historical roots for the development of clinical interventions and test variants of adaptation within a family stress model for understudied at-risk groups including; post-deployed military families, ethnically diverse adolescents from lower SES backgrounds, and recently divorced and single-father families.

The symposium brings together researchers from a diverse set of institutions who have actively conducted online research. The first paper evaluates the Fathering Through Change program and examines efficacy data from an online parent training program tailored to single and divorcing fathers. The second paper examines pilot data from a large scale comparative effectiveness trial of the Family Check Up and tests online only and online plus coaching parent training relative to a control group. The study was designed to prevent problem behaviors in middle school adolescents. The third paper conducts a replication test of an online parent training and an in-person plus online parent training with respective control conditions in randomized trials of post-deployed military families. This paper evaluates the After Deployment Adaptive Parenting Tools (ADAPT).

The symposium supports the conference themes of Development and Testing of Interventions and Innovative Methods and Statistics. The discussant will end the symposium with a summary comparison of the papers and will moderate dialogue between presenters and symposium attendees. It is expected that implications for intervention development and delivery of evidence based practices for hard to reach populations will be appealing to SPR meeting participants.