This AREA project investigates how contextual approaches to assessment can enhance our understanding of child psychopathology and our ability to interpret and predict children's responses to psychoeducational intervention. In contrast to widely used syndromal approaches, which emphasize the overall rate of children's problem behaviors, contextual approaches emphasize the patterning of children's behavior over different social contexts and how often children experience those contexts. Recent evidence suggests that despite their prominence in the field, syndromal measures can fail to detect individual differences among children in the social situations that elicit their behavior and may hamper efforts to predict who will show enduring benefits from treatment.
The specific aims of the research described in this proposal are: 1) to investigate how well syndromal versus contextual assessment methods reveal children's responses to treatment and predict durability of treatment effects across settings 2) to investigate gender differences in the contextual patterning of children's problem behaviors and how they may be linked to differential treatment response and 3) to develop efficient, multi-informant contextual rating methods. We will collect data on 360 children with emotional and behavioral problems before, during, and after an intensive 45-day summer treatment program. Teachers and parents will provide syndromal and contextual ratings of behavior problems in the spring and in the fall of the following school year. Counselors will provide those same ratings at three points during the summer. They will also complete hourly behavioral observations during the summer. Counselors, teachers and parents will also provide impressions of change. This AREA project will provide high quality research training for numerous future mental health researchers and professionals. It will also provide current researchers, clinicians, and educators with tools to better detect treatment effects that are context-specific yet potentially important, better evaluate why interventions impact children differently, and better predict the transfer or non-transfer of treatment gains to other settings. Contextual assessment methods should also improve communication between parents, teachers, clinicians, and other professionals by clarifying how and why behavior so often differs over settings (e.g., home, school, therapy).
| Cardoos, Stephanie L; Zakriski, Audrey L; Wright, Jack C et al. (2015) Peer Experiences in Short-Term Residential Treatment: Individual and Group-Moderated Prediction of Behavioral Responses to Peers and Adults. J Abnorm Child Psychol 43:1145-59 |
| Hartley, Anselma G; Zakriski, Audrey L; Wright, Jack C (2011) Probing the depths of informant discrepancies: contextual influences on divergence and convergence. J Clin Child Adolesc Psychol 40:54-66 |
| Zakriski, Audrey L; Wright, Jack C; Cardoos, Stephanie L (2011) Peer-nominated deviant talk within residential treatment: individual and group influences on treatment response. J Abnorm Child Psychol 39:989-1000 |
