Effectiveness of the Incredible Years parent training programme (V1)
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Effectiveness of the Incredible Years parent training in reducing preschool behavioural problems: the role of parental cognitions/characteristics.
IRAS ID
212592
Contact name
Emily Taylor
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Edinburgh
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 8 months, 27 days
Research summary
Research demonstrates that parent management training (PMT) is an effective treatment for behaviour problems in young children. However, it does not work for all families and many parents drop out from the programme before it has finished. Exploring factors that contribute to parents’ engagement in the programme is important as it can help to identifying caregivers' needs in relation to engagement early on and may allow preparatory or additional support to be implemented in order to allow them to gain benefit.
Reasons for disengagement may include how parents understand their children’s behaviour (often called ‘attributions’), parental stress, parental attachment, and the parent’s ability to consider their child’s emotions, intentions, needs and thoughts. This kind of ‘thinking about thinking’ is sometimes called ‘metacognition’.
The main research question is: what role do parental attachment insecurity, parental attributions and metacognition play in parents’ ability to engage with and derive benefit from a community-based parenting intervention? Benefit is defined as reductions in parenting stress and improvement in pre-school child behaviour problems.
PMT is currently being run by local authorities across Scotland. This study plans to access these groups and will ask parents of children aged 3-6 years old, who attend the Incredible Years preschool parenting programme run by local authorities about different factors which may impact on their attendance at this programme. Participants will attend the Incredible Years group as normal. This study will use questionnaires pre- and post- group (week 1 and week 14, which will take approximately 90 minutes to complete over the two time periods). Parents’ responses will be used in statistical analyses that will investigate the relationship between variables described above.
Should participant uptake be too low in Edinburgh then other local authorities will be contacted such as West Lothian, Fife and Perth and Kinross.REC name
North West - Haydock Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
16/NW/0674
Date of REC Opinion
26 Sep 2016
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion