Study 1
Cicchetti, Rogosch, and Toth (2006) examined the efficacy of specific types of behavioral versus relationship-based interventions for infants from maltreating families (including Infant–Parent Psychotherapy) through a randomized preventive intervention trial. Year-old infants from maltreating families (60 boys, 77 girls) and their mothers were randomly assigned to one of three intervention conditions: Infant–Parent Psychotherapy (IPP), Psychoeducational Parenting Intervention (PPI), and community standard (CS) controls. The IPP intervention, an adaption of Child-Parent Psychotherapy for infants which is more concentrated on maternal representation and the mother–child relationship, while the PPI intervention is oriented more toward parent skills. The CS condition included no enhanced services; rather, families received services that are typically available to maltreating families.
A Department of Human Services (DHS) recruitment liaison identified infants known to have been maltreated or living in maltreating families with their biological mothers (or both). Eligible families were contacted, and mothers who were interested in participating in the study provided informed consent and signed release forms that allowed access to DHS records regarding the family’s involvement with Child Protective Services. DHS records were retained and coded using the Maltreatment Classification System. Among the recruited sample of infants, 66.4 percent had directly experienced abuse or neglect (or both) during the first year of their lives. The remaining 33.6 percent of infants were living with families in which abuse or neglect had been experienced by siblings. Of the infants who had experienced abuse or neglect, 8.8 percent had been physically abused, 69.3 percent had been emotionally maltreated, and 84.6 percent had been neglected.
Following a baseline assessment, mothers and children were randomly assigned to one of three groups: IPP (n = 53), PPI, (n = 49), and CS (n = 35). The groups did not differ on child gender, maternal age, maternal minority race/ethnicity, current receipt of TANF, total family income, or marital status. The entire study sample was 53.4 percent infant girls. Mothers averaged 27 years old, 74.6 percent were of minority race/ethnicity, and 12.7 percent were currently married. However, not all mothers in the intervention groups (IPP and PPI) participated in treatment. Overall, about 40 percent of the mothers randomly assigned to the IPP intervention and 51 percent of the mothers randomly assigned to the PPI intervention did not participate. A comparison of the IPP group, the IPP decliners, the PPI group, the PPI decliners, and the CS group revealed no significant differences on baseline demographic variables. The CrimeSolutions review of this program focused on the intent-to-treat analyses examining the differences between the IPP treatment group (including the IPP decliners) and the CS control group.
Measures of interest consisted of the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ), the Perceptions of Adult Attachment Scale (PAAS), the Maternal Behavior Q–Set (MBQ), the Adult–Adolescent Parenting Inventory (AAPI), the Social Support Behaviors Scale (SBS), the Parenting Stress Inventory (PSI), and the Strange Situation scale. The CTQ measures past experiences of maltreatment, of both the infants and the mothers. The PAAS measures an individual’s perceptions of the quality of her early childhood relationship with her mother, as well as her perceptions regarding current attachment and relationship with her mother. The MBQ consists of 90 items that assess maternal sensitivity in relating to the infant that are measured during a 3-hour home observation session. The AAPI is a 32-item questionnaire that measures parenting and childrearing attitudes. The SBS is a 45-item instrument that measures real and potential social supports available to individuals. The PSI is a 101-item questionnaire that assesses parenting stress in the child domain and the parent domain. The Strange Situation was conducted to measure the infant’s attachment organization. Multivariate analyses of variance (MANOVAs) were conducted to determine differences between groups. The study authors did not conduct subgroup analyses.