Efficacy of the Getting Ready Intervention and the Role of Parental Depression

Abstract

Research Findings: This study reports the results of a randomized trial of a parent engagement intervention (the Getting Ready intervention) on directly observed learning-related social behaviors of children from low-income families in the context of parent–child interactions. The study explored the moderating effect of parental depression on intervention outcomes. Participants were 204 children and their parents as well as 29 Head Start teachers. Semistructured parent–child interaction tasks were videotaped 2 times annually over the course of 2 academic years. Observational codes of child behaviors included agency, persistence, activity level, positive affect, distractibility, and verbalizations. Practice or Policy: When gender and disability concerns were controlled, those in the treatment condition experienced a significant decline in activity level relative to children in the control group. Furthermore, compared to children of nondepressed mothers and to control children, those in the experimental condition whose parent reported elevated levels of depression showed greater gains in positive affect and in verbalizations.

Notes

¹¹CES-D does not yield a clinical depression diagnosis but rather identifies depressive symptoms. We use the term depression to describe our sample as demonstrating elevated scores on the CES-D, not as clinically diagnosed individuals.

²²Effect size is calculated as the ratio of the group difference in linear change (γ) to the standard deviation of the slope values (Raudenbush & Liu, 2001).