Examining Parents’ Preferences for Group and Individual Parent Training for Children with ADHD Symptoms

Abstract

Parent training (PT) programs have been found to reduce some behavioral impairment associated with children's attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as well as improve parenting competence, but poor uptake and participation by parents are formidable barriers that affect service effectiveness. We used a discrete-choice experiment (DCE) to examine how parent preferences for treatment format (i.e., group vs. individual) might influence their participation in PT. Participants were 445 parents seeking mental health services for children with elevated symptoms of ADHD in Ontario, Canada. Parents completed a DCE composed of 30 choice tasks used to gauge PT format preference. Results showed that 58.7% of parents preferred individual PT; these parents were most interested in interventions that would make them feel more informed about their child's problems and in understanding—as opposed to solving—their child's problems. A minority of parents (19.4%) preferred group PT; these parents were most interested in active, skill-building services that would help them solve their child's problems. About one fifth of parents (21.9%) preferred the Minimal Information alternative (i.e., receiving neither individual or group PT); these parents reported the highest levels of depression and the most severe mental health problems in their child. Results highlight the importance of considering parent preferences for format and suggest that alternative formats to standard PT should be considered for multiply stressed families.

Notes

¹We use the term “youth” to refer to children and adolescents.

²We use the term “parent training” to refer to “behavioral parent training” throughout the text.

³We use the term “prefer” instead of “predicted to prefer,” language used by marketing researchers (Orme, 2013), here and throughout the article to enhance readability of the text.

⁴We ran MANOVAs for two reasons, including (a) there were several correlated dependent variables and we aimed to study whether segments differed on a set of variables (e.g., child/family functioning) before looking at individual results, and (b) we wanted to explore how segment membership influenced patterning of response on several dependent variables.

⁵The following sections refer to Tables 4 and 5, that is, results from importance scores and utility values.