Poster #97 - Identifying the Critical Features of Effective Interventions for Early Mental Health Promotion

• In Event: Poster Session 17

Abstract

Background: While parenting interventions can be effective at improving early mental health, impacts tend to be modest, and few programmes have scaled successfully in routine service contexts (Shonkoff, 2016). Despite being carefully and systematically developed, interventions are typically disseminated as static proprietary protocols that require high resource for delivery. For early interventions to be viable at scale, programmes need to be dismantled into simple, accessible, and brief strategies that can be delivered across different modalities and providers. Effective components or common elements analysis provides a way to isolate the discrete practice strategies and delivery and implementation factors that are associated with the strongest effects for different outcomes.

Aim: The present study aims to identify the common practice, delivery, and implementation elements of effective intervention programmes for early mental health (0-4 years). We will primarily focus on children’s internalising, externalising, and social emotional competence, with a secondary focus on parent-related outcomes (parenting behaviours, attitudes, and parental mental health). An additional aim is to synthesise evidence on the programme elements that are valued by families and practitioners themselves or considered barriers or facilitators to impact and delivery.

Method: There will be two phases to our method and analysis. In Phase 1, we will undertake a systematic review to identify effective parenting interventions for early childhood mental health (0-4 year olds). We will include parent-mediated, brief (≤ 16 sessions) programmes, targeting children aged 0-4 years, that include a standardised mental health outcome, with a sample size ≥50, and evidence of effectiveness from at least two experimental or quasi-experimental studies. In Phase 2, we will extract core skills and identify common elements of the programmes identified in Phase 1 through a detailed coding and statistical process applied to the interventions' manuals and other relevant materials.

Planned analyses: The analyses will include quantitative and qualitative components. For the statistical analysis, common elements will be analysed per outcome (e.g., internalising behaviour, externalising behaviour, social emotional competence). Descriptive data of included programmes will first be presented. Then, a meta-regression will be undertaken to identify programme component effect sizes per outcome area. For the qualitative component, we will identify qualitative findings regarding the acceptability of included interventions to parents and practitioners. We will use content analysis to identify features of interventions that are considered helpful/unhelpful and act as barriers and facilitators to acceptability and feasibility of delivery. Practice and delivery components that predict the strongest effects will be identified and intervention principles will be derived by mapping these to mechanisms and domains. We anticipate that all discussed analyses will be completed by the conference for inclusion in the poster presentation.

Potential implications: This work has the potential to provide powerful information regarding programme and implementation components that can amplify the impact and scaleability of interventions targeting the mental health of children in their earliest years.

Group Authors

Expert Advisory and Stakeholder Groups

Authors

• Beth Barker, University of Cambridge
  Presenting Author

• Christine M O'Farrelly, University of Cambridge

• Natalie Kirby, University of Cambridge