Study
Gottfredson and colleagues (2006) examined intervention fidelity and effectiveness of the Strengthening Families Program (SFP) using a four-group experimental design with a sample of 715 predominately African American families in an urban setting. Families were recruited at schools and local events by five organizations in the Washington, D.C., area. One site was a prerelease center for incarcerated parents; the other agencies recruited from schools and the community. Some 1,400 families from high-risk neighborhoods were approached, and 715 (51 percent) were enrolled. Eligible families had a child between the ages of 7 and 11 years and were able to read, speak, and understand English. Participating parents were predominately African American (75 percent) and female (94 percent), and more than half (52 percent) reported a combined family annual income of less than $20,000.
Eligible families were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: child skills training (CT) only (
n
= 176), parent skills training (PT) only (
n
= 177), parent and child skills training plus family skills training (FT;
n
= 188), and minimal treatment (MT) control group (
n
= 174). The FT treatment group received the fourteen 3-hour sessions of the SFP that included a) 1 hour of pre-class activities, b) 1 hour of parent skills training and a simultaneous child skills training class, and c) 1 hour of family skills training conducted in two multifamily groups, each led by two group leaders. The other two intervention groups received either the parent training or the child training component of the SFP, but not all three components. Pretests and posttests were administered to small groups of parents and children before interventions began, and then approximately 1 week after the intervention ended.
Three different outcome surveys were derived from previous tests constructed from standardized scales: a 56-item survey for younger children (ages 7 and 8), a 138-item survey for older children (ages 9 through 11), and a 195-item survey for parents. The content of the surveys, which included both parent and child reports, consisted of child problem behaviors, child risk and protective factors, and family factors.
The parent- and child-reported outcomes were analyzed with analysis of covariance that included a dummy variable to account for the various sites and pretest scores as covariates in each analysis.
Study
Maguin and colleagues (2007) recruited 674 families in the United States and Canada to participate in an ongoing binational study of SFP. Families with at least one child between the ages of 9–12, and a parent who had had alcohol problems within the past five years, were eligible to participate. The majority of families were recruited through advertisements in local newspapers; through posters hung in local treatment agencies, social service agencies, or other family settings; and through presentations by project staff to therapists and social service personnel.
Parents were screened to verify that they had responsibility for a child between the ages of 9 and 12, and that the child’s parent or caretaker had had a diagnosable alcohol problem within the past five years as evidenced by a report of 1) treatment at an alcohol treatment agency, 2) sustained involvement in Alcoholics Anonymous, or 3) positive responses to at least two of five problem criteria from the Research Diagnostic Criteria established by the study authors. In cases where the parent with alcohol problems had left the family and could not be contacted, the report of the remaining parent was sufficient to qualify the family, provided that the potentially qualifying parent had demonstrated a significant level of alcohol problems and treatment involvement. If a family had more than one child in the 9–12 age range, one child was randomly selected as the target.
There were a total of 334 study participants from Canada, and 340 participants from the United States. In the U.S. study sample, the average age of the child was 11 years old. The sample was predominately Black (63.0 percent), followed by white (33.7 percent), Aboriginal (5.0 percent), Hispanic (4.1 percent), and Asian (0.3 percent). The Canadian study sample was different in terms of demographics. The average age of the children was 10.8 years. The vast majority of the sample was white (88.8 percent), followed by Aboriginal (10.9 percent), Black (5.2 percent), Hispanic (2.4 percent), and Asian (1.5 percent). The families were grouped into cohorts of those who had agreed to attend a program at a certain location and beginning on a certain date. The cohort ranged from 7 to 29 families per group, with an average size of 15. The families were interviewed separately, face-to-face, prior to the scheduled start of the SFP program. Following the pretest assessment, families were randomly assigned to SFP or to the comparison group. Families completed a second assessment following the completion of the SFP program. Although there were differences between the two subgroups in the study (Canadian versus U.S. participants), there were no significant differences between the SFP treatment group and comparison group.
The primary outcomes of interest were the behavior problems of the children, as measured by 31 items from the Ontario Child Heath Study. Parents responded to the items on a 3-point scale (never/not true, somewhat/sometimes true, or very true/often true). Thirteen of the items corresponded to symptom criteria for conduct disorder, and nine corresponded to symptom criteria for oppositional defiant disorder. The remaining items corresponded to other types of externalizing behavior problems, such as getting into fights or hanging around kids who get into trouble. An intent-to-treat design was used to analyze the data.
Study
Brook, McDonald, and Yan (2012) evaluated SFP as part of a child welfare service intervention. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the impact of the provision of SFP on family reunification among substance-involved families in a Midwestern state area. The study included families who had a child in an out-of-home placement, who had a case plan goal of family reunification, and for whom substance abuse was determined by the caseworker to be a contributing factor in the child welfare case. Staff in six private foster-care provider agencies received six trainings as SFP leaders and were trained in two age-specific versions of the SFP program curriculum (target child ages 3–5 and 6–11).
Data for the analyses came from the information provided by the SFP site providers for federal reporting purposes. Data included 214 SFP participants and 423 matched nonparticipants who were tracked from February 2008 through September 2010. The comparison group was selected from a pool based on the following criteria: 1) children who were discharged due to emancipation were excluded; 2) as the formal starting date for the demonstration project was October 1, 2007, all children who were reunified prior to September 31, 2007 were excluded; and 3) consistent with SFP participant children, only children who were removed later than January 1, 2002, were younger than 15 at removal, and younger than 17 on April 22, 2010, were included for matching. There were no significant differences between the SFP treatment group and the comparison groups on covariates such as time in placement, child’s birthday, child’s gender, and race/ethnicity. Survival analysis was used to study the time to a particular event (in this study, it was time to reunification). Time was measured in two ways: 1) time from removal to reunification for cases that were reunified, and 2) time from entry into SFP to reunification for cases that were reunified. Time was measured as the time period in which the case was observed (that is, time from removal until the last day of observation on October 30, 2010).