Abstract
School-based psychosocial interventions are a widely used approach to prevent or reduce externalising behaviour. However, evaluating the effects of such interventions is complicated by the fact that the interventions may not only change the target behaviour, but also the way that informants report on that behaviour. For example, teachers may become more aware of bullying behaviour after delivering lessons on the topic, resulting in increased teacher reports of the behaviour. In this study, we used multi-group confirmatory factor analysis to evaluate whether teachers exposed to the Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies (PATHS) intervention changed the way they reported on child externalising behaviour. Using data from the z-proso study (802 participants; 51% male; 69 teachers), teacher reports of aggressive behaviour, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and non-aggressive conduct disorder symptoms were compared pre- and post- intervention and across the intervention and control conditions. There was no evidence that teacher reporting was affected by exposure to the intervention. This helps bolster the interpretation of intervention effects as reflecting changes in child behaviour, rather than in the manner of informant reporting.
Highlights
Externalising behaviours, including aggression, bullying, nonaggressive conduct problems and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms, create significant challenges for affected individuals, their parents and schools
Metric invariance was judged to hold if the addition of equality constraints in loadings resulted in a decrease of no more than 0.010 in the comparative fit index (CFI), an increase of no more than 0.015 in the root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) and an increase of no more than 0.030 in the standardised root mean square residual (SRMR)
Scalar invariance was judged to hold if the addition of equality constraints on intercepts resulted in a decrease in CFI of no more than 0.010, an increase in RMSEA of no more than 0.015 and an increase in SRMR of no more than 0.010
Summary
Externalising behaviours, including aggression, bullying, nonaggressive conduct problems and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms, create significant challenges for affected individuals, their parents and schools. It has been proposed that some school-based interventions fail to show positive effects because they sensitise informants to the behaviours that the intervention seeks to change This, it is argued, can result in increased reporting of those behaviours post-intervention (for a discussion, see Chalamandaris and Piette 2015). They highlighted that these measurement differences would have resulted in biased estimates of the treatment effect had they not been identified and steps taken to ensure the measurement changes were appropriately modelled Despite their potential to confound the estimation of treatment effects in school-based interventions, there has been an almost complete lack of research into response shifts in this area. The programme may have increased their own understanding of certain child behaviours, making them less likely to attribute the motive as aggressive Evaluating whether such changes in teacher reports occurred was the focus of the current study
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