Oregon Social Learning Center has a well-developed treatment model for adolescents with severe conduct problems using specialized foster care (SFC). Because of several recent changes in delivery of services to children in Oregon, the OSLC foster care referral base has expanded to include much younger children who have been removed from their families of origin because of maltreatment. This affords an unusual opportunity to adapt the SFC model from an intensive treatment for adolescents to a preventive intervention for young children at very high risk to develop conduct disorder. The proposed project is a pilot study to examine the feasibility and potential of """"""""Early Intervention Foster Care"""""""" (EIFC), a program specifically designed for children 3 to 6 years old. The study will consist of 3 groups of 10 children each: 1) Children in the EIFC condition will be placed in OSLC foster homes and receive a targeted preventive intervention; 2) children in the treatment comparison condition will be placed in conventional foster homes overseen by the state child protective services agency; 3) the normative comparison condition will consist of typically developing children living with their biological parents. Children in the groups 2 and 3 will be matched to children in the EIFC condition by socioeconomic status of their biological family, ethnicity, child age, and child gender. Through exit interviews and foster parent focus groups, the feasibility of the EIFC program will be evaluated in terms of 1) foster parents' ability to understand and willingness to participate in different components of the preventive intervention, and 2) the plausibility of using a number of assessment measures that have previously not been tested in a foster care context. Children in the study will be assessed in terms of reduction in behavior problems; a common focus of OSLC specialized foster care and of the coercion theory model. In addition, the coercion model will be extended via inclusion of two domains of risk in early childhood hypothesized to contribute to the coercive process: l) emotion/physiological regulation, and 2) developmental delays in fine motor, gross motor, adaptive, cognitive, speech-communication, and social skills. Group comparisons will be made of positive change during the three months in the study (i.e., decreased behavior problems, improved emotion regulation, remediation of developmental delays). This project will lay the groundwork for, and provide information crucial to, the design of a larger scale efficacy trial.
| Fisher, P A; Gunnar, M R; Chamberlain, P et al. (2000) Preventive intervention for maltreated preschool children: impact on children's behavior, neuroendocrine activity, and foster parent functioning. J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry 39:1356-64 |
