The preventive and therapeutic effects of two school mental health programs

Abstract

In 30 classrooms randomly assigned to experimental conditions, effects on mothers' reports of behavior symptoms were compared for (a) a parent education program; (b) an in-school program of consultation, counseling, training, and referral; and (c) control classrooms. A sample of 426 families were followed for 30 months from the child's entry into third grade. A simple unweighted count of the number of symptoms reported in a home interview had adequate validity, good reliability, low reactivity, and intrinsic significance. Both programs had significant preventive and therapeutic effects on boys but not on girls. Effects were immediate in the upper middle class families, delayed in the lower class families.Beginning in 1953 the St. Louis C o u n t y (Missouri) Health D e p a r t m e n t u n d e r t o o k an ambitious a t t e m p t to subject its school mental health programs to a rigorous evaluation. The evaluation covered a period of 30 m o n t h s in two 1 The larger study on which this article is based was initiated some years ago by Professor Glidewell and his colleagues, and represents a pioneering research effort in the field of community psychology. The present article was prepared by the authors in response to an invitation from the Editor to report important and still timely aspects of the original study that were not previously published in archival sources. We are grateful to Professor Glidewell and his colleagues for giving us this opportunity to make their findings more generally available to community psychology researchers. 2This work was supported by rese~ch grant M-592 from the National Institute of Mental Health, U.S. Public Health Service, and the St. Louis County Health Department.3Requests for reprints should be sent to Professor John C. Glidewell, Department of Education, University of Chicago, 5835 Kimbark Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60637. The authors wish to express special gratitude to Herbert R. Domke, A. D. Buchmueller, Henry F. Kaiser, Ivan N. Mensh, and Win. G. Cochran whose suggestions were invaluable to the work. 295Copyright Q 1 9 7 3 by V. H. Winston & Sons, Inc. 296GLIDEWELL, GILDEA, AND KAUFMAN phases: the first 12 months, the second, 18 months. The data collection and analysis covered about 6 years, and no doubt some of the data are still under analysis. A general report of the outcome of the work was published by Gildea, Glidewell, and Kantor (1967). The present study reports one part of the specific data, the effects of the programs on the behavior symptoms of the school children, as reported by their mothers.The problem of the evaluation research was to compare the effects, preventive and therapeutic, of the availability of three levels of school mental health programs. To assess the preventive effects it was necessary to establish that the programs reduced the rate of appearance of new behavior symptoms; to assess the therapeutic effects it was necessary to establish that the programs increased the rate of termination of old symptoms.It should be noted that the problem was to ...

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