News Release

Family-strengthening intervention program strengthened

Grant and Award Announcement

Penn State

Preliminary testing of modifications to a program aimed at strengthening families showed that parents improved their ability to control anger, exhibited less negativity and acted more positively toward their children.

The study, funded by a $3.3-million grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and carried out by Penn State researchers, will test changes to an intervention program called "Strengthening Families Program: For Parents and Youth 10-14" (SFP 10-14) which educates parents and children on ways to enhance their relationships.

Researchers led by Dr. Douglas Coatsworth, associate professor of human development and family studies, are adapting SFP 10-14, which was established to prevent the onset of teen drug use and shows good results. Coatsworth believes the program can be strengthened and could also prevent other poor outcomes in teens, such as risky sexual behavior.

"The Strengthening Families Program is one of the most promising universal family-based preventive interventions, " said Coatsworth. "Research shows that it delays the onset of substance use, improves parenting practices, increases youths' resistance to peer pressure and reduces aggressive or destructive behavior," says Coatsworth. "However, most of those studies have been done by the same research group, and independent replication will strengthen the evidence for the program's efficacy."

This new study is not only an attempt to evaluate SFP 10-14, but is also charting new territories in prevention science. The adapted intervention is providing parents with a set of skills that has not been tested in any family-based prevention programs to date, according to Coatsworth.

The revised approach was created by a team of researchers and clinicians working closely with Virginia Molgaard, associate professor emerita, Iowa State University who created the original SFP-10-14 program.

"We think that the new activities will help parents see their youths behavior and their parenting from a new, more positive perspective and is likely to enhance the parent-youth relationships more than earlier tests of this intervention," says Coatsworth.

A pilot study showed that parents did improve their anger control ability, showed less negativity and were more positive toward their children. For the full study, the researchers will test the intervention with 600 families of sixth- and seventh-grade children in five Pennsylvania school districts.

Researchers involved in the project include Coatsworth; Mark Greenberg, director of the Prevention Research Center for the Promotion of Human Development and Edna P. Bennett Chair in Prevention Research in Human Development and Family Studies, Penn State; Larissa Duncan, former Penn State graduate student and now assistant professor, department of family and community medicine and the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine; Robert Nix, research associate, Penn State's Prevention Research Center for the Promotion of Human Development; Christa Turksma, prevention consultant, and Elaine Berrena, senior project associate, College of Health and Human Development, Penn State.

The project will be conducted through Penn State's Prevention Research Center for the Promotion of Human Development.

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