What makes parenting programmes work in disadvantaged areas? The PALS trial.

Completed

Conditions: Mental and Behavioural Disorders
Parenting quality and childhood antisocial behaviour and underachievement
Antisocial behaviour in children

Registration Number: ISRCTN65265832

Lead Sponsor: King's College London (UK)

Brief Summary: Not available

Detailed Description: Not available

Recruitment & Eligibility

Status: Completed

Sex: All

Target Recruitment: 174

Inclusion Criteria

First, in each school, each year, an intervention and a control class was randomly selected; children were in reception class or year one, thus aged 4-5 years old.
Second, letters went out to all parents and coffee mornings were held; the intervention programme was offered to everyone in the intervention class regardless of the child's problem behaviour.
Third, parents who expressed an interest were then contacted to assess further eligibility criteria:
1. Ability to understand English
2. Index child free of clinically apparent marked general global developmental delay or disorder
All parents of high risk children were offered places, and parents of 4 low risk children were randomly selected to form each group.

Exclusion Criteria

Opposite of inclusion criteria above, hence parents who expressed no interest were not contacted to assess further eligibility criteria; parents were excluded if they were interested, but lacked:
1. Ability to understand English
2. Index child free of clinically apparent marked general global developmental delay or disorder

Study & Design

Study Type: Interventional

Study Design: Not specified

Primary Outcome Measures

Name	Time	Method
Direct observation of attachment promoting parenting style. The observation procedure of the Conduct Problems Research Group (1999) was used, with videotaping of parent-child interaction at home across three tasks:<br>1. Child directed play (ten minutes)<br>2. Parent directed task - child attempts a difficult construction with Lego toy bricks (ten minutes)<br>3. Parents gets child to tidy away the toys (three minutes)<br>A recently devised coding scheme (Matias 2005) was used that measures sensitive responding, the core construct in attachment theory.

Secondary Outcome Measures