Parent-Child Interaction Therapy: Parents' Perceptions of Untreated Siblings

ABSTRACT

This study evaluates parents' perception of the generalization of treatment effects to untreated siblings following parent-child interaction therapy with oppositional preschoolers and their parents. Partiipants were 30 referred families randomly assigned to an immediate treatment or waitlist control group who completed parent rating scale measures of disruptive behavior at intake and 16 weeks later. Improvements in the parents' report of referred children's behavior were adequate to test treatment generalization to siblings. Relative to siblings in the waitlist control group, fathers rated the behavior problems of untreated siblings in the treatment group as occurring less frequently, and mothers rated the untreated siblings' behavior as less problematic. This experimental demonstration of parental perception of treatment generalization to untreated siblings may be important for maintenance of treatment gains for the referred child.