Decreasing Children's Fighting through Self-instructional Parent Taining Materials

Abstract

Parents used self-instructional booklets to decrease children's (age 3-8) fighting. In each of 16 families a multiple-baseline design across three programs, fighting and two others, was used. Parent data indicate improvement in 12 of 16 families, with median improvement of 48 percent; during treatment aggressive behaviour averaged approximately half its baseline rate. All final consumer ratings of program effectiveness were positive. Due to variability, parent daily record graphs supported clear improvement in only five children and possible improvement in two. All interobserver reliabilities exceeded 70 percent agreement weighted for occurrence and non-occurrence. Percent agreements between parent and observer interval data for 1-hour sessions averaged 70 percent. However, the independence of some of these observer and parent recordings is in question. On reliability days parents also made independent post-session estimates of the frequency of fighting. The observer-parent within-family correlations across visits averaged r = 0. 70. Observer reliability was taken in all 16 families and parent-observer reliability with nine.