Evaluating the Effectiveness of Intervention Programs

This week, you bring much of the research you have examined in this course together in an analysis of a socio-emotional development intervention program. You chose your intervention program in Week 6, and you completed a brief annotated bibliography of relevant research examining the effectiveness of your chosen intervention in Week 8. This week, you bring together these parts that you have completed in a paper that demonstrates your ability to think critically about an intervention program aimed at promoting social and emotional development through the lens of current research in the area. 

Be sure you have incorporated your Instructor’s feedback from Parts I and II.

For Part III this week, please write a 5- to 7-page paper (not including title page and reference page) that includes the following parts:

Summary Summarize the program/target population, its medium of administration (school, community center), and the social and emotional development aspect it aims to address. Summarize research evidence from at least 3 empirical articles about the effectiveness of the intervention.

Analysis and Evaluation Address the following: Is the intervention culturally sensitive as designed? How could it be changed to accommodate different cultural norms? (The Domenech Rodríguez and Resnicow articles from this week’s Learning Resources will be helpful to you in this part of your paper.) Discuss 2 or 3 specific ways that this intervention could be improved based on what you studied this quarter. Please support your arguments with scholarly sources from your annotated bibliography. Does this intervention have any social change implications when thinking broadly about social and emotional development? If so, what are they? If not, why not?

Please use subheadings in APA style to aid in the organization of this paper.

previous assignments listed;

week 8 assignment:  

Annotated Bibliography Reviews

Some articles and journals have previously looked into and investigated the effectiveness, importance, areas of applications of selective or intervention programs that are strategically aimed at high-risk individuals. From the three sampled peer-review I looked at these risk individuals can be criminals, addicted persons or children, adolescents at risk or depressed individuals, I believe these articles are quite significant to my research project going forward since they can be the benchmark upon which I develop my project ideas. The three articles that I reviewed include the following: Preventing depression and anxiety in young people: a review of the joint efficacy of universal, selective and indicated prevention. Psychological medicine, (Stockings et al., 2016). Secondly Effectiveness of a selective intervention program targeting personality risk factors for alcohol misuse among young adolescents: results of a cluster randomized controlled trial. Addiction, (Lammers et al., 2015). The final article is a cluster‐randomized controlled trial evaluating the effects of delaying the onset of adolescent substance abuse on cognitive development and addiction following a selective, personality‐targeted intervention program: The Co‐Venture trial. Addiction, O’Leary‐Barrettet al., 2017).

Lammers, J., Goossens, F., Conrod, P., Engels, R., Wiers, R. W., &Kleinjan, M. (2015). Effectiveness of a selective intervention program targeting personality risk factors for alcohol misuse among young adolescents: results of a cluster randomized controlled trial. Addiction, 110(7), 1101-1109.

The reason for the study was to test the effectiveness of prevention techniques on the drinking behavior and trends of young adolescents in secondary school education in the Netherlands, the researchers conducted the study in a total of 15 secondary schools with a total of about 699 adolescent participants who ranged between age 13 and 15 (Lammers et al., 2015). The prevention measure used was selective school-based alcohol prevention program which targeted personality risk influences. They found out that binge drinking rates were not significantly different when they compared the intervention (42.9%) and control group (49.2%) at 12 months’ follow-up. They concluded and suggested that selective prevention is key to alcohol prevention program (Lammers et al., 2015). This paper elaborated just how high-risk children can show some improvements when they take a prevention program that is selective which perfectly fits my assumptions and thesis.

O’Leary‐Barrett, M., Masse, B., Pihl, R. O., Stewart, S. H., Seguin, J. R., & Conrod, P. J. (2017). A cluster‐randomized controlled trial evaluating the effects of delaying onset of adolescent substance abuse on cognitive development and addiction following a selective, personality‐targeted intervention program: the Co‐Venture trial. Addiction, 112(10), 1871-1881.

The researchers aimed to investigate if substance use and binge drinking, all through the onset of adolescence, are related to or associated with neurocognitive abnormalities, mental health complications and arisen risk for future addiction. The researchers sampled 38 high schools, 31 out of the 38 will have intervention and control condition. They then invited all grade 7 kids to participate between the ages of 12 and 13 (O’Leary‐Barrettet al., 2017). Brief personality-targeted and selective intervention programs were delivered to high-risk youth who were attending intervention schools throughout the first year of the trials (O’Leary‐Barrettet al., 2017). The paper found out that through the controlled trials which were longitudinal and cluster-randomized appropriately investigated the impact and general influence of the personality-targeted and selective intervention program on decreasing the onset of addiction four years-post intervention. Results tried to separate the developmental sequences of uptake and growth in substance use (abuse) and cognitive development in adolescence using developmentally sensitive neuropsychological procedures (O’Leary‐Barrettet al., 2017). This paper proved to be quite a significance in that it gave me a lot of insight on just how selective prevention programs can be implemented over a significant sample size and can be the benchmark upon which I develop my project ideas.

Stockings, E. A., Degenhardt, L., Dobbins, T., Lee, Y. Y., Erskine, H. E., Whiteford, H. A., & Patton, G. (2016). Preventing depression and anxiety in young people: a review of the joint efficacy of universal, selective and indicated prevention. Psychological medicine, 46(1), 11-26.

According to the article depression and anxiety are among the most significant contributors to non-fatal health burden among young people. A systematic review was conducted by researchers of Medline, Psych-Info and the Cochrane Library of Systematic Reviews, from the year 1980 all the way to August 2014. They performed a multivariate meta-analysis which they used to examine the efficacy of preventive interventions on depression and anxiety outcomes separately, and the combined effects on both disorders pooled (Stockings et al., 2016). The research used 46,072 participants participated in a total of 146 randomized controlled trials. Significant additionally is that this paper is the first to endeavor a meta-examination which inspected the joint viability of all-inclusive, particular, and demonstrated preventive intercessions upon both dejection and tension among youngsters and youths (5– 18 years). According to the authors universal, selective and indicated prevention interventions are effective in decreasing internalizing disorders and symptoms in the short term (Stockings et al., 2016). They also went ahead to state that reductions in internalizing disorder onset transpired up to 9 months post-intervention, whether, selective (RR 0.61, 95% CI 0.43–0.85) or indicated (RR 0.48, 95% CI 0.29–0.78). They finally suggested that considerations should be made on repeated exposures in a school setup throughout childhood and adolescence (Stockings et al., 2016). Based on this paper I could use this information as literature review in support of my thesis that selective or indicate intervention program encompasses a secondary strategy that vitally targets high-risk children and entails training by a teacher.

References

Lammers, J., Goossens, F., Conrod, P., Engels, R., Wiers, R. W., &Kleinjan, M. (2015). Effectiveness of a selective intervention program targeting personality risk factors for alcohol misuse among young adolescents: results of a cluster randomized controlled trial. Addiction, 110(7), 1101-1109.

O’Leary‐Barrett, M., Masse, B., Pihl, R. O., Stewart, S. H., Seguin, J. R., &Conrod, P. J. (2017). A cluster‐randomized controlled trial evaluating the effects of delaying onset of adolescent substance abuse on cognitive development and addiction following a selective, personality‐targeted intervention program: the Co‐Venture trial. Addiction, 112(10), 1871-1881.

Stockings, E. A., Degenhardt, L., Dobbins, T., Lee, Y. Y., Erskine, H. E., Whiteford, H. A., & Patton, G. (2016). Preventing depression and anxiety in young people: a review of the joint efficacy of universal, selective and indicated prevention. Psychological medicine, 46(1), 11-26.

week 6 assignment:  

Indicated Intervention Program

Selective or indicate intervention program encompasses a secondary strategy that vitally targets high-risk children and entails training by a teacher. The teacher training gets aligned towards transforming the plan of classroom management. This intervention approach gets coupled with the implementation of added small-group instruction. Studies affirm that the teacher preparations linked to minimal externalizing concerns in high risk arisen. Hence, concerns have ensued regarding the pullout sessions’ efficacy. The pull-out interventions are of significance in for the competence development in children since the process of obtaining social skills becomes sustained by interacting with the children with excellent development skills (CPPRG, 1999). However, training small numbers of high-risk individuals might delay the progress, as well as reinforce the present negative behaviors.

Similarly, the intervention of at high-risk persons originates from a hybrid model of prevention that integrates the provision of combined intervention simultaneously. This program comprises of teacher training, small group training, as well as parent training. In most scenarios, aggressive, as well as non-compliant children disrupt the activities of a classroom daily. Hence, their behaviors become reinforced unwittingly by teachers via the s=discipline strategies that are ineffective. In conjunction with the low levels of misbehavior in high-risk individuals, teachers make use of affirmative procedures of discipline like timeout, misbehaviors’ logical consequences, as well as rule set. The selective intervention program is consistent with the Fast Track program developers and plays a vital role in fostering positive results for all children. The teacher consultations facilitate the classroom curriculum implementation coupled with effective intervention results on the emotion and social competencies’ development in children (Shure, 1997). The consultations facilitate the development of strategies of coaching used by teachers for all children despite their risk status. 

References

Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group. (1999). The initial impact of the Fast Track prevention trial for conduct problems: II. Classroom effects. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology.

Shure, M. B. (1997). Interpersonal cognitive problem-solving: Primary prevention of early high-risk behaviors in the preschool and primary years. In G. W. Albee, & T. P. Gullotta, Primary prevention works. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage