Effectiveness of a Foster Parent Intervention: Results of a Trial (PVO)

Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Status: Unknown

Conditions: Problematic Behavior in Children; Parent-child Problem

Treatments: Behavioral: Foster parent intervention

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT01821755

ID0032

Details and patient eligibility

About

The hypothesis of the study is that the intervention leads to a reduction in foster children's externalizing problems and foster parents' parenting stress and that this in turn leads to a reduction in the number of breakdowns of foster placements.

Enrollment: 63 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 3 to 12 years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• foster child has a borderline or clinical score on one of the small-band externalizing scales or the broad-band externalizing scale of the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL)

Exclusion criteria

foster child:

• has a mental retardation,
• autism,
• uses psychotropic medication in an inconsistent way,
• behavioral problems are the result of medical problems or medication, foster parents:
• have insufficient knowledge of Dutch,
• have low cognitive abilities,
• are already receiving professional support for the foster child's externalizing problems,
• are divorcing.

Moreover, foster placements were excluded if at least two of the following criteria were present:

• foster parents considered terminating the foster placement during the past two months
• were experiencing psychological distress (measured with the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ; Koeter & Ormel, 1991) and defined as a score ≥ 2),
• their foster child had a sum score above 3 (for children < 6 years) or 5 (for children ≥ 6 years) on the critical CBCL-items.

Trial design

Primary purpose: Treatment

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

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63 participants in 2 patient groups

Behavioral: Foster parent intervention

Experimental group

Description:

Foster parents receive a foster parent intervention consisting of 10 individual home visits and three group sessions. Duration of the intervention is four months

Treatment:

Behavioral: Foster parent intervention

Control

No Intervention group

Description:

waiting-list control group who receive care-as-usual