Evaluating the effectiveness of the Family Connections program for caregivers of youth with mental health challenges, part I: A quantitative analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The Family Connections™ (FC) program is a 12-week support and skill-training program for caregivers of youth with mental health challenges. The intervention was originally developed with a focus on borderline personality disorder (BPD). It is important to understand the experiences of caregivers in such interventions, as well as its applicability beyond BPD, for the purposes of evaluation and ongoing program improvement. OBJECTIVE: To explore and analyse the experiences of caregivers of youth with diverse mental health challenges and who participated in FC. DESIGN: Semi-structured interviews with thirteen FC-participating caregivers of youth with mental health challenges. RESULTS: Thematic analysis uncovered three major themes regarding caregivers' experience with FC: (a) FC increased the caregivers' ability to manage their youth's mental health challenges; (b) participating in FC impacted their intra- and interpersonal spheres; and (c) improvements to the program were proposed. Following participation in FC, caregivers felt they learned a new approach to understanding themselves, their youth and mental health, and were better able to manage their youth's mental health challenges. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION: FC is a promising intervention for caregivers of youth with mental health challenges, beyond the traditional BPD focus. The intervention has the potential to provide broad-based benefits for caregivers and should be considered for implementation and scale-up across youth- and caregiver-serving organizations. Potential areas of intervention flexibility and improvement are discussed. PATIENT/PUBLIC CONTRIBUTION: Caregivers were involved in the program development and facilitation of FC. A person with lived experience was involved with the analysis.
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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 | 0.025 | 0.046 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".