8.L. Workshop: The children and parents in focus: Challenges in evaluating a public health approach to parenting
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Parenting programs have strong evidence in promoting positive changes in both parents and children and are considered as evidence-based treatments for children with externalising problems such as conduct problems and ADHD. It is expected that a public health approach to parenting - i.e., the availability of parenting programs to all parents regardless of their risk status - will reduce the number of children with externalising problems at the population level. However, the evidence on the effectiveness of this approach is inconclusive. This is largely due to difficulties in conducting the needed large population trials of universal parenting programs. The objective of the workshop is to facilitate a discussion on planning and conducting research projects to successfully evaluate the effectiveness of psychological interventions such as parenting programs when they are offered universally to everyone. We will describe three main challenges in evaluating a public health approach to parenting: difficulties in collecting data from the whole population (and not only those exposed to the intervention), lack of validated instruments to measure population-level impact, and low program exposure. To illustrate our points, we use a population-based cluster randomised controlled trial as an example. The aim of the project - Children and Parents in Focus - was to test the effectiveness of a universally offered parenting program in addressing emotional and behavioural problems in preschool children. The project was carried out for four years in a municipality with 200 000 inhabitants in Sweden. Data were collected from mothers, fathers and teachers of over 7 000 children aged 3 to 5 years. The workshop will include a brief introduction and three presentations. In the first presentation, we focus on recruitment of parents into the study. We discuss the rational for recruiting parents of all children aged 3-5 into the study through child health centres and the steps that we took to increase the number of parents who participated in the study. In the second presentation, we describe the primary outcome measure in the study i.e., the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaires (SDQ) collected from fathers, mothers and preschool teachers. We discuss how we validated the SDQ for all the three informants and developed a guideline for using the SDQ during routine health check-ups. In the third presentation, we explain our challenges in recruiting parents to the intervention, particularly the restrictions imposed on us by the trial design and describe how we addressed low program participation. After each presentation, the participants will be invited to share their experiences, thoughts and ideas. Their comments will be first collected through a digital interactive platform and then discussed in the room. Key messages Successful evaluation of a public health interventions at the population-level requires ample attention to the recruitment of participants into research and intervention. Program uptake can be increased using simple low cost direct-to-consumer marketing strategies; however, it does take time to build demand for the program.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.087 | 0.063 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.004 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".