Promises (and Perils?) of Innovative Research Methods to Optimize Child and Youth Interventions

This presentation provides an introduction to the 20x20 symposium on innovative research methods to optimize child and youth interventions. It will (1) explain why child and youth interventions are in need of optimization; (2) introduce some of the key research methods currently used by prevention scientists to optimize these interventions; and (3) discuss the promises and perils of these research methods to actually optimize interventions for children and youth.

First, child and youth interventions can be an effective strategy to prevent children’s mental health problems, but their effects are small to medium at best. Second, even our most effective interventions show large differential benefits: many children do not benefit at all, while others benefit both substantially and meaningfully. Third, it is largely unknown which components child and youth interventions need to include in order to be effective. Fourth, many evidence-based interventions are too expensive, or require too much therapist training, to take them to scale, particularly to children living in low-resource communities. Thus, child and youth interventions are in need for optimized effectiveness, efficiency, and scalability.

Prevention scientists increasingly adopt innovative research methods to guide our efforts to optimize child and youth interventions. Instead of relying on traditional randomized controlled trials alone, today’s prevention scientists adopt novel secondary data-analysis strategies (e.g., multilevel meta-analysis, individual participant data meta-analysis, or qualitative comparative analysis), different experimental paradigms (e.g., factorial experiments), and carefully analyze processes of program adaptation and dissemination. In doing so, they try to answer enduring questions on how child and youth interventions work, and on how they can be improved.

Each of these research methods has its own promises and perils for guiding the optimization of family interventions. In this presentation, we discuss for example the limitations of traditional meta-analysis to study differential effectiveness across families that can and cannot be overcome by individual participant data meta-analysis, and the benefits of increased efforts to combine quantitative and qualitative strategies (e.g., in mixed-method systematic reviews and qualitative comparative analysis). What can we expect from these methods in terms of guiding us to optimize the effectiveness, efficiency, and scalability of child and youth interventions?