The ultimate purpose of this research program is to develop a widely-applicable program of treatment for families of conduct disordered children. Therefore, all of the parent training procedures assessed in this study have been designed so as to be available to large numbers of people with a minimal amount of professional time. The study will compare the effectiveness of three models of parent training with a placebo control therapy. The models include: 1) a group discussion approach; 2) a self-administered videotape modeling approach; 3) a combined videotape modeling plus group discussion approach; and 4) a placebo control group. Families of 80, 3-to-7-year old children with conduct problems will be assigned at random to one of the four groups. The treatment program will be compared as to which training model is most effective for improving parents' knowledge, attitudes, behaviors, and childrearing methods, for reducing conduct problems, for increasing children's prosocial behaviors, for long term effectiveness anc cost effectiveness. Multiple outcome measures will be used to assess treatment effectiveness. Home and laboratory observations of parent-child interactions will be used as well as parent interviews, behavior problem checklists, and teacher reports. In keeping with an ecological perspective, broader factors such as utilization of social supports, father involvement, life crises, and measures of parent personality will also be assessed in order to determine their impact in conduct disordered children and treatment effectiveness. In view of the fact that recent research has shown verbal training methods to be unreliable methods, particularly for parents with deficiencies in either education or general intellectual levels, this study has importance because it assesses whether videotape modeling can enhance the effectiveness of the traditional group discussion programs. With the increasing numbers of children at all social class levels with conduct disorders, the efforts to find and evaluate carefully more cost effective and efficient approaches for training parents seems particularly worthwhile. Moreover, since many nurses are placed in strategic positions in community health centers to recognize early signs of conduct disorders in children, the eventual purpose of this study will be to develop effective parent training procedures which can be readily carried out by nurses.
