Abstract
BackgroundIndividual Social Skills Training (ISST) is a short term, individually delivered intervention (8-10 sessions) that promotes social skills in children with emerging or existing conduct problems. This study examined the effectiveness of ISST immediately and 6 months after the termination of the intervention.MethodsThe participants were 198 children (3-12 years) who were randomly assigned to ISST or practice as usual. The data were collected from parents, children and teachers.ResultsFindings showed positive change on most outcomes in both study conditions. However, examining the relative effectiveness of the intervention, only one positive effect of ISST emerged on parent-reported child conduct problems immediately after intervention.ConclusionsThese results suggest that compared to the control group, ISST had limited effects in ameliorating child problem behavior. These data suggest that it is not sufficient to provide ISST when aiming to reduce conduct problems in children.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13034-014-0031-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
Individual Social Skills Training (ISST) is a short term, individually delivered intervention (8-10 sessions) that promotes social skills in children with emerging or existing conduct problems
The findings showed that most studies included small samples (70.8% had fewer than 49 participants), and only a few of the studies (10.4%) evaluated individually delivered social skills training
To examine the unique effect of individually delivered social skills training on conduct problems, the current study evaluated the effectiveness of Individual Social Skills Training (ISST)
Summary
Individual Social Skills Training (ISST) is a short term, individually delivered intervention (8-10 sessions) that promotes social skills in children with emerging or existing conduct problems. Longitudinal studies have shown that adolescent and adult antisocial behavior and criminal involvement often have roots in conduct problems that begin in early childhood. Both individual risk factors (e.g., undercontrolled temperament, attention problems and delayed motor development) and social factors (e.g. parental neglect of child, inconsistent and harsh discipline) are important to the emergence and persistence of conduct problems [1]. Children with conduct problems are at risk of being rejected and disliked by peer students as Kjøbli and Ogden Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health (2014) 8:31 controlled trial immediately following and six months after the completion of the intervention. The fact that ISST was tested in an effectiveness trial (i.e., real world settings), and not in an efficacy trial (i.e., optimal settings), makes it likely that the findings from the current sample are generalizable to the population of Norwegian children with conduct problems
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