Session: Dealing with Individual Differences in Reducing Disruptive Child Behavior (Society for Prevention Research 26th Annual Meeting)

Prevention strategies tend to target families with elevated risk on the outcome they want to prevent. Interventions for the prevention of conduct disorder therefore mainly target families with elevated levels of disruptive child behavior. Families with disruptive child behavior, however, are a very heterogeneous groups. For example, parenting practices may play an essential role in maintaining disruptive child behavior in some families (e.g., coercive interactions), but less so in other families where deeper underlying difficulties may play an essential role and causes multiple behavior problems (e.g., emotion regulation deficits). What is the implication of these individual differences for prevention strategies? To what extent contribute individual differences to differential effectiveness of prevention strategies, and to what extent do prevention strategies in turn decrease or increase individual difference (i.e., socioeconomic disparities in mental health problems)? This symposium addresses these issues.

The first presentation sheds light on the type of families (e.g., families engaged in coercive interaction patterns vs families not engaged in coercive interaction patterns) that benefit from the Incredible Years parenting intervention for reducing disruptive child behavior. The second presentation sheds light on the extent to which families with more/less resources benefit from the Parent Management Training - Oregon model, and whether these socioeconomic disparities decrease or increase from intervention. The third presentation sheds light on a different approach for reducing disruptive child behavior in children with comorbid problems: a transdiagnostic approach where underlying deficits are targeted. The contributions highlights families with different risks and needs and the interventions that may best help them for the prevention of conduct disorder.