Engagement in behavioral family therapy: A multisite investigation

Abstract

For 2 years, eight sites providing behavioral family treatment collected data about demographic characteristics, the type of intervention provided, and the record of treatment attendance, yielding data on 181 families. A stepwise discriminant analysis found four functions which distinguished between locations: family communication training, home token economy, marital intervention, and parent support group, and accounted for 76% of between-locations variance. These functions describe naturally occurring clusters of treatment and family characteristics, suggesting that properties of the family ecology were taken into account when type of behavioral family intervention was selected. A second discriminant analysis contrasted families engaged (74%) and not engaged (26%) in treatment and found that engaged families tended to receive family communication training (often together with other types of intervention) and to have fathers and mothers with high occupational prestige, fathers who worked many hours, and two natural parents. Taken together these results suggest that evaluation of a behavioral family intervention must consider background family characteristics as well as the magnitude of family behavior change.