Effectiveness of Online Parent Training for Parents of Adolescents with Developmental Disabilities: A Retrospective Observational Study Comparing Clinical- and Community-Based Online Parent Training.

Abstract

Background: Parent training (PT) is an effective program for improving the parenting skills and mental health of parents of children with developmental disabilities (DD) and for improving children's behavioral problems. However, studies must substantiate the effectiveness of PT for the parents of adolescents with DD in improving parental mental health and children's problem behaviors with ample scientific evidence. This study is a retrospective observational study and has two objectives. The first is to examine the effectiveness of online adolescent PT (ON-APT), in which lectures on counseling skills are incorporated for the parents of adolescents with DD. The second aim is to examine the effects of different delivery conditions on community- and clinical-based ON-APT.

Methods: Data from seven parents and children who participated in community-based ON-APT and 14 parents and 12 children who participated in clinical-based ON-APT were included in the analysis. Prior to the intervention (pre-test) and after the intervention (post-test), paired t-tests were conducted using the CBCL, BDI-II, and PATS scores to demonstrate the effectiveness of the ON-APT program. Second, a two-way repeated measures analysis of variance with aligned rank transform was conducted to assess the impact of varying ON-APT delivery conditions (clinical- versus community-based ON-APT) and time (pre- and post-tests) on the outcome variables.

Results: ON-APT resulted in significant improvements in some children's problem behaviors (withdrawal). Community-based ON-APT resulted in improvements in some children's problem behaviors (total score, withdrawal, and social problems scales) compared with clinical-based ON-APT.

Conclusion: This study shows the potential effectiveness of ON-APT, in which lectures on counseling skills are incorporated for parents of adolescents with DD. Further, a comparison between clinical-based and community-based ON-APT showed that integrating face-to-face consultations into ON-APT may improve children's problem behaviors. However, this study provides preliminary evidence for its potential efficacy, and future studies should demonstrate this efficacy through a validation design.