Beyond the Label: Relationship Between Community Therapists' Self-Report of a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Orientation and Observed Skills.

Policy-makers, payers, and consumers often make decisions based on therapists' reported theoretical orientations, but little is known about whether these labels represent actual or potential skills. Prior to CBT training, therapists (n = 321) reported theoretical orientations. Experts rated CBT competency using the Cognitive Therapy Rating Scale Therapy at pre-, mid-, and post-training. CBT- and non-CBT identified therapists showed equivalent, non-competent baseline CBT skills. CBT-identified therapists showed greater CBT skills at mid-training, but by end of training, groups evidenced equivalent achieved competency. Baseline CBT orientations were neither valid, nor useful markers of later competency. Policy, clinical and research implications are discussed.

The Preventing Relational Aggression in Schools Everyday Program: A Preliminary Evaluation of Acceptability and Impact.

Despite recent research suggesting that relationally aggressive behaviors occur frequently and may lead to physically aggressive actions within urban school settings, there has been little prior research to develop and evaluate relational aggression prevention efforts within the urban schools. The current article describes the development and preliminary evaluation of the Preventing Relational Aggression in Schools Everyday (PRAISE) Program. PRAISE is a 20-session classroom-based universal prevention program, designed to be appropriate and responsive to the needs of youth within the urban school context. Results suggest strong acceptability for the program and feasibility of implementation. Further, the program was especially beneficial for girls. For instance, girls in classrooms randomly assigned to the PRAISE Program demonstrated higher levels of knowledge for social information processing and anger management techniques and lower levels of relational aggression following treatment as compared to similar girls randomly assigned to a no-treatment control condition. Further, relationally aggressive girls exhibited similar benefits from the program (greater knowledge and lower levels of relational aggression) plus lower levels of overt aggression following treatment as compared to relationally aggressive girls within the control classrooms. In contrast, the program was not associated with improvements for boys across most measures. The significance and implications of the findings for research and practice are discussed.

Using Participatory Action Research to Design an Intervention Integrity System in the Urban Schools.

While integrity is often thought of as the degree to which a program is applied as intended, researchers have recently widened the lens to include not only monitoring of program content, but also evaluating the process by which interventions are implemented and the extent to which the intervention is received as intended. Further, a partnership-based approach has been identified to be as critical to facilitating appropriate and accurate monitoring and interpretation of intervention integrity in the cultural context. Building on these expanded definitions of intervention integrity, this study describes how an intervention monitoring system was developed through participatory research in the context of a classroom-based aggression prevention program for students in an inner-city elementary school. The system highlighted evaluation of the quality of intervention delivery and participant responsiveness. Factor analysis, descriptive statistics, and comparison to a less nuanced integrity monitoring system provided information on the informativeness of this new system. Preliminary investigation, however, suggested that future research is necessary to examine the extent to which differences in quality of implementation across classrooms predict clinically significant differences in program outcomes.