A Parenting Behavior Intervention (the Strengthening Families Program) for Families: Noninferiority Trial of Different Program Delivery Methods
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The Strengthening Families Program (SFP) is an evidence-based parent training and youth life skills and drug prevention program traditionally delivered in group settings. Families attend parent and youth classes conducted by trained facilitators. Recently, a 2-disk home-use DVD series was created with the same SFP skills as the group classes for parents and the youth to watch together at home. Additional lesson material was added that included healthy brain development, school success, anger management, dangers of alcohol and drugs, and mindfulness. The SFP DVD reduces SFP delivery costs for agencies and logistic burdens to families. Creative applications of the DVD include holding SFP DVD family discussion groups of multiple families and using SFP DVD video clips as part of a shorter 10-week group class version for parents and the youth. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to examine three different DVD implementation scenarios using a noninferiority trial, contrasting target outcomes with an age-matched sample culled from a national norm database of families who completed a standard SFP 14-week class. METHODS: The partial eta-square was used to compare effect sizes between the different delivery modalities for relevant programmatic outcomes. We adjusted the effect sizes by demographic measures to determine whether there were site-specific features influencing program outcomes. RESULTS: For the unadjusted effect size comparisons, 13 of the 15 indicated that the home-use DVD outperformed group norms with an average 0.13 effect size estimate difference across the comparisons (28% improvement in the effect size for DVD condition). Comparisons of the home-use DVD condition with the mixed DVD use conditions showed no discernable pattern where one condition consistently outperformed another. Adjusted effect sizes still reinforced the superiority of the DVD conditions; however, there was some shrinkage in the effect sizes as expected with the inclusion of relevant covariates. CONCLUSIONS: The home-use DVD shows that it is possible to effectively deliver an affordable family-based intervention using alternative technology outside of the traditional group-based class format. In almost all of the comparisons, the DVD conditions outperformed the group norms, underscoring that low-cost DVDs or viewing the videos on the Web may provide a useful surrogate for costly group-based formats. Future studies may want to improve on the quasi-experimental design by examining programmatic differences based on delivery format using a randomized controlled trial, thus strengthening the causal framework regarding program effects. In addition, the assessment protocol relied on retrospective reporting, which, although this can limit response shift bias, does not separate data collection in time as with a true pre- and posttest design.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".