? ? Parent attendance is a significant challenge to family-focused prevention across all levels of prevention work (universal, selected and indicated), but perhaps most challenging and least studied for indicated prevention programs with parents of at-risk teens. Parents of at-risk teens, and the teens themselves, often suffer a number of personal, family and economic hardships that can diminish a parent's interest and satisfaction in parenting, and affect willingness and ability to attend parenting sessions. At the same time, indicated programs ask more of participants in terms of time and level of involvement in order to be successful. The Parents as Partners (Partners) component of Project PAYS (Parents and Youth in Schools) was a response to NIDA's call for drug abuse prevention programs for high risk youth that included family intervention (PA 96-013). PAYS is an indicated prevention program designed to address one of society's most disturbing trends: the co-occurrence of drug use/abuse, aggression, and depression among youth who are at risk for dropping out of high school. The Partners curriculum addresses family risk factors linked to co-occurring youth problem behaviors. Partners requires a parent attend 15 sessions, a combination of home and group meetings, designed to foster parenting skills and support teen success in RY, and a number of strategies were used to recruit and retain parents. The resulting parent participation rates exceeded typical attendance while showing a useful variation across parents: over 95% of 162 eligible parent households attended at least one session, and more than half completed the series. The proposed study is a secondary analysis of parent attendance in the Partners program, utilizing parent and youth self-report, interventionist process ratings related to session attendance, and in-depth interviews to examine factors that enhance and impede parent participation. This analysis offers an opportunity to examine a wide range of factors as they contribute to understanding session-by-session attendance patterns. The multi-source, multi-method data available for this analysis increase the generalizability and applicability of these research findings to the implementation of more well attended and hence more effective indicated prevention efforts. ? ?
| Hooven, Carole; Pike, Kenneth; Walsh, Elaine (2013) Parents of older at-risk youth: a retention challenge for preventive intervention. J Prim Prev 34:423-38 |
