Coping Power Program
Study: Zonnevylle-Bender et al. (2007); van de Wiel et al. (2007)

Describe how students were selected to participate in the study:

Children entering four child psychiatric outpatient clinics and three mental health centers during a period of almost 3 years (October 1996-August 1999) were allowed to participate in the study when they met the inclusion criteria. Children were included if (a) they were 8 to 13 years of age, (b) they met the criteria for DBD in accordance with DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association, 1994; comorbidity with other disorders was allowed), (c) they were living within a family (i.e., not in an institution), and (d) their intelligence was at least 80 based on the results of two subtests (Vocabulary and Block Design) of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children–Revised (Vandersteene et al., 1986; Wechsler, 1974).

Describe how students were identified as being at risk for academic failure (AI) or as having emotional or behavioral difficulties (BI):

All child participants had a Disruptive Behavior Disorder diagnosis.

ACADEMIC INTERVENTION: What percentage of participants were at risk, as measured by one or more of the following criteria:

• below the 30th percentile on local or national norm, or
• identified disability related to the focus of the intervention?

%

BEHAVIORAL INTERVENTION: What percentage of participants were at risk, as measured by one or more of the following criteria:

• emotional disability label,
• placed in an alternative school/classroom,
• non-responsive to Tiers 1 and 2, or
• designation of severe problem behaviors on a validated scale or through observation?

%

Specify which condition is the submitted intervention:

UCPP. The UCPP is an adaptation of the CPP (Lochman & Wells, 1996), a school-based preventive intervention program that includes a parent and a child component. Because the CPP is a preventive program of intervention, the UCPP needed to be adjusted for the more severely disturbed children and their parents. For example, the UCPP sessions were more varied, with proportionally fewer discussions and more activities to suit the short attention span of the children. In addition, the CPP child component consists of 33 weekly sessions during a 15-month period. Such a period is very long for use in everyday clinical practice. We therefore reduced the number of sessions of the child component to 23 during a period of 9 months, whereas the number of sessions of the parent component was reduced from 18 to 15. The parental and the child components were not only combined, they were also integrated. This was accomplished in several ways. First, the same therapists were used for both the parental and the child groups. This made it easier to transfer the information on children’s achievements and progress to their parent or parents and reduced the risk that children would try to play the therapists and parents against each other. Second, to involve the parents in the child treatment, the last fourth of the parental meeting was devoted to the previous child session or sessions. Parents were given a summary of the child session or sessions, and the therapists explained the topics of the child session or sessions. In several parental sessions, some minutes of videotaped child sessions were also shown (e.g., anger management, each of the five problem-solving skills).

Specify which condition is the control condition:

Control condition. Participants were provided with mental health services typically offered in each of the facilities. The decision about the type of treatment for each participant was made in staff meetings and was based both on clinical and pragmatic grounds (e.g., availability of therapists). The treatments in the C condition were divided into three groups: (a) family therapy (n=10), (b) behavior therapy (n=16), and (c) various other treatments (e.g., parental guidance, play therapy; n=13). To divide the treatments into one of the three groups, charts were reviewed to identify the type of treatment, and type was checked with the therapist. Then, the types of treatment were categorized into one of the three groups. Family therapy was based on general systems theory (Watzlawick, Bavelas, & Jackson, 1967) and communication theory (Jackson, 1967). Family therapy was not manualized. Family therapists were specifically trained (through courses and supervision by qualified supervisors across multiple years). Their mean years of experience with family therapy was 3.22 (SD=7.01), and their mean years of experience of being a therapist in general was 10 (SD=6.93). The number of the family therapy sessions was 11.20 (SD =6.29). Behavior therapy consisted of either manualized group social skills training for the child combined with manualized group sessions with the parents or nonmanualized individual treatment with the child and the parents. In both forms of behavior therapy, operant and cognitive procedures were combined. The behavior therapists were specifically trained (through courses and supervision by qualified supervisors across multiple years). Their mean years of experience with behavior therapy was 6.05 (SD=5.95), and their mean years of experience of being a therapist in general was 10.6 (SD=7.57). The number of the behavior therapy sessions was 17.75 (SD=13.93). Other treatments varied to such an extent that they were not included in the analyses.

If you have a third, competing condition, in addition to your control and intervention condition, identify what the competing condition is (data from this competing condition will not be used):

NA

Using the tables that follow, provide data demonstrating comparability of the program group and control group in terms of demographics.

Grade Level

Race–Ethnicity

Socioeconomic Status

Disability Status

ELL Status

Gender

What method was used to determine students' placement in treatment/control groups?

Random

Please describe the assignment method or the process for defining treatment/comparison groups.

van de Wiel et al (2007) p 300: Children entering four child psychiatric outpatient clinics and three mental health centers during a period of almost 3 years (October 1996- August 1999) were allowed to participate in the study when they met the inclusion criteria. These children and their parents were then randomly assigned to either the adjusted version of the CPP condition or to the care as usual condition (C condition). Zonnevylle-Bender et al. (2007), p. 36: Participants were recruited from child psychiatric outpatient clinics and mental health centers. If they fulfilled the inclusion criteria, they were randomly assigned to either the UCPP or the CU condition.

What was the unit of assignment?

Students

If other, please specify:

Please describe the unit of assignment:

What unit(s) were used for primary data analysis?

Schools
Teachers
Students
Classes
Other
If other, please specify:

Please describe the unit(s) used for primary data analysis:

How was the program delivered?

Individually
Small Group
Classroom

What were the background, experience, training, and ongoing support of the instructors or interventionists?

Therapists (with a master’s degree in psychology but with limited clinical experience) received 6 months of training prior to the start of intervention and received weekly scheduled supervision of their intervention work.

Describe when and how fidelity of treatment information was obtained.

To ensure that these intervention components were provided as planned, procedures were formulated for developing and evaluating intervention integrity. Detailed manuals were used for both the UCPP parent component and the UCPP child component. Moreover, all child and parent group sessions were videotaped for random selection by the supervisors (i.e., experienced clinicians) to check adherence to protocol.

What were the results on the fidelity-of-treatment implementation measure?

NA

Was the fidelity measure also used in control classrooms?

NA

For any substantively (e.g., effect size ≥ 0.25 for pretest or demographic differences) or statistically significant (e.g., p < 0.05) pretest differences, please describe the extent to which these differences are related to the impact of the treatment. For example, if analyses were conducted to determine that outcomes from this study are due to the intervention and not pretest characteristics, please describe the results of those analyses here.

Please explain any missing data or instances of measures with incomplete pre- or post-test data.

If you have excluded a variable or data that are reported in the study being submitted, explain the rationale for exclusion:

Describe the analyses used to determine whether the intervention produced changes in student outcomes:

To study the effect of treatment, we used repeated measures analyses of variance (ANOVA) with treatment condition as the between-subjects factor and time as the within-subjects factor. First, we compared UCPP (n =38) to C (n =26), consisting of participants in the family therapy and behavior therapy groups. Second, we compared UCPP to family therapy (n =10) and UCPP to behavior therapy (n =16). Because of the low numbers of participants in the family therapy and behavior therapy groups, we also tested treatment effectiveness in terms of effect sizes. The effect size statistic is an index of the magnitude and direction of therapy effects. Effect size is the difference between the means of two sets of scores divided by the pooled standard deviation of the two sets (Cohen, 1988). The two set of scores consisted of difference sores, that is, the difference between pretreatment and posttreatment scores within each condition. The index d is a measure of the degree to which the two sets differ in terms of standard deviation units. For example, a d index of .25 indicates that the two means were separated by one fourth of a standard deviation. In general, an effect size of .80 is considered to be large, .50 moderate, and .20 small (Cohen, 1992).