Parenting Children and Adolescents (PARCA) scale English to Spanish translation: An investigation of measurement invariance.

Parenting is multidimensional and dynamic, involving a complex set of behaviors as well as thousands of decisions and interactions that affect the lives of children. Numerous parenting measures have been developed over the years, but very few have been shown to have strong psychometric properties. Further, of those with strong psychometric properties, only a handful have been translated into Spanish, and these have not been well tested. Given the importance that parenting plays in the development of children and the fact that Latinos are the fastest growing minority group in the United States, there is a need for studies of general parenting measures that compare the psychometric properties of their English and Spanish versions. The current study tests measurement invariance of the English and Spanish versions of the Parenting Children and Adolescents (PARCA) scale, a brief 19-item questionnaire designed to measure parenting practices in children between the ages of 6 and 18 years. Results indicate that the PARCA was largely invariant across language groups (i.e., configural and metric invariance were supported); though a few items demonstrated differential functioning in the intercepts, effect sizes for these group differences were generally modest to negligible. Thus, findings suggest that the PARCA can be used to measure parenting dimensions and examine associations among those dimensions in studies of English- compared with Spanish-speaking parents. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Predictors of participation in parenting workshops for improving adolescent behavioral and mental health: results from the common sense parenting trial.

Engaging and retaining participants are crucial to achieving adequate implementation of parenting interventions designed to prevent problem behaviors among children and adolescents. This study examined predictors of engagement and retention in a group-based family intervention across two versions of the program: a standard version requiring only parent attendance for six sessions and an adapted version with two additional sessions that required attendance by the son or daughter. Families included a parent and an eighth grader who attended one of five high-poverty schools in an urban Pacific Northwest school district. The adapted version of the intervention had a higher rate of engagement than the standard version, a difference that was statistically significant after adjusting for other variables assessed at enrollment in the study. Higher household income and parent education, younger student age, and poorer affective quality in the parent-child relationship predicted greater likelihood of initial attendance. In the adapted version of the intervention, parents of boys were more likely to engage with the program than those of girls. The variables considered did not strongly predict retention, although retention was higher among parents of boys. Retention did not significantly differ between conditions. Asking for child attendance at workshops may have increased engagement in the intervention, while findings for other predictors of attendance point to the need for added efforts to recruit families who have less socioeconomic resources, as well as families who perceive they have less need for services.

Adherence and Dosage Contributions to Parenting Program Quality.

OBJECTIVE: The 3 most frequently examined elements of treatment fidelity are adherence, dosage, and quality. The relationships between these fidelity elements are complex, and additional research is needed to provide clarity. Improving clarity may be especially relevant to parenting programs, which tend to include direct explicit instruction (DEI) elements (i.e., instruction, modeling, and practice). The adherence to and dosage of these DEI elements are frequently assumed to improve program quality; however, little information is available to determine if such adherence and dosage affect program quality. This study examines whether adherence to and dosage of DEI elements predict quality ratings for a widely disseminated, manualized parenting program. METHOD: Adherence is defined as the percentage of intervention tasks completed for each DEI element. Dosage is defined as the number of minutes and seconds spent in each intervention DEI element. Treatment fidelity is assessed for 36 of 144 sessions across 10 program facilitators. A hierarchical linear regression analysis examines the contributions of adherence and dosage in the prediction of session quality ratings. RESULTS: The analysis indicates that adherence accounts for a significant proportion of the variance (26%), whereas dosage contributes a nonsignificant proportion of variance (11%). Adherence to skill practice was the strongest individual predictor (ß = .445, p < .01). CONCLUSIONS: Findings suggest that ensuring a high degree of adherence can contribute to quality program delivery. However, more exploration is needed to better understand the ways in which adherence and dosage of DEI elements affect program quality.

Implementation assessment of widely used but understudied prevention programs: an illustration from the Common Sense Parenting trial.

Common Sense Parenting is a parent-training program that is widely disseminated, has promising preliminary support, and is being tested in a randomized controlled trial that targets lower-income, urban 8th-grade students and their families (recruited in two annual cohorts) to improve the transition to high school. The workshop-based program is being tested in both standard 6-session (CSP) and modified 8-session (CSP Plus) formats; CSP Plus adds adolescent-skills training activities. To offer a comprehensive picture of implementation outcomes in the CSP trial, we describe the tools used to assess program adherence, quality of delivery, program dosage, and participant satisfaction, and report the implementation data collected during the trial. Results indicated that workshop leaders had high adherence to the program content and manual-stated goal times of the CSP/CSP Plus curriculum and delivered the intervention with high quality. The majority of intervention families attended some or all of the sessions. Participant satisfaction ratings for the workshops were high. There were no significant cohort differences for adherence, quality and dosage; however, there were significant cohort improvements for participant satisfaction. Positive fidelity results may be due to the availability of detailed workshop leader guides, in addition to ongoing training and supervision, which included performance-based feedback.