This application, submitted as an Urgent Competitive Revision in response to NOT-MH-20-047, ?Notice of Special Interest (NOSI) regarding the Availability of Administrative Supplements and Urgent Competitive Revisions for Mental Health Research on the 2019 Novel Coronavirus,? represents a change in scope from our currently-funded R01, which seeks to examine the long-term crossover effects of the FCU on depression and suicide-risk using Integrative Data Analysis across three randomized trials. These randomized trials include a large sample of children and families who received the FCU in early childhood and middle school. At that time, the FCU was delivered as an in-person model, and was adapted for both school and home delivery. Since that time, the FCU has been adapted to an online version which has been effective with middle school youth at enhancing parenting self-efficacy and reducing child emotional problems (Stormshak et al., 2019). Given the wide-ranging negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on parent and child functioning, there is an urgent need for effective family-focused prevention/intervention programming that can employ telehealth-delivery formats to reach families in the midst of the current pandemic and future public health crises of similar scale. The proposed administrative supplement will adapt and test the efficacy of the Family Check-Up Online as a treatment to foster resilient family functioning in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We will test the effects of the adapted FCU Online program in a randomized clinical trial with 150 families with youth aged 10 ? 14 years, and assessed over 4 time-points across 6 months. We will examine the effects of the adapted FCU Online on key mechanisms of change, including parenting skills, parental depression, and parent/child self- regulation, that we predict will directly impact child and family functioning. We predict that changes in these key targets of the intervention will impact participant?s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including youth depression and behavior problems, the ability to cope with pandemic-focused stressors (e.g. dealing with changes in employment status or functioning; following mandated safety measures), and social/familial functioning (including relational support and risk for domestic violence).
The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted families adversely in multiple ways. Given the scale of pandemic impacts for families with school-aged children, the identification of effective family-focused interventions that target core mechanisms of change with a broad range of benefits for parents and youth across diverse populations, and that can be brought to scale rapidly and with fidelity, represent critical public health goals. The proposed administrative supplement will adapt and test the efficacy of the Family Check-Up Online as a treatment to foster resilient family functioning in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We will test the effects of the adapted FCU Online program on key mechanisms of change, including parenting skills, parental depression, and parent/child self-regulation, that we predict will directly impact child and family functioning. We predict that changes in these key targets of the intervention will impact participant?s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including youth depression and behavior problems, the ability to cope with pandemic-focused stressors (e.g. dealing with changes in employment status or functioning; following mandated safety measures), and social/familial functioning (including relational support and risk for domestic violence).
