Intervention Planning Process Research Articles

Community Psychology in Italy: Introduction and Prospects

The history of community psychology in Italy is briefly reviewed. The field has developed extensively in universities and applied settings over the past 30 years. This issue presents 5 recent examples from different regions of Italy of preventive and other community psychological intervention studies. They include an evaluation of a program to increase the independent mobility of children walking to and from school, the ecological evaluation of child and adolescent residential care communities, participatory action-research with adolescents in schools and neighborhoods, evaluation of a participatory local health intervention planning process, and the description and evaluation of a collaborative, Internet-based community planning training program.

A STATEWIDE STUDY OF SCHOOL-BASED INTERVENTION TEAMS: CHARACTERISTICS, MEMBER PERCEPTIONS, AND OUTCOMES

Surveys were administered to members of approximately 400 school-based teams participating in a statewide initiative promoting intervention-based assessment. Team members provided information about their teams' demographic characteristics, communication, leadership, and decision-making processes. Results were analyzed in terms of team features and characteristics as well as relationships between these features and several outcomes, including school faculty/staff perceptions of the acceptability of teams; ratings of school support for, and teams' mastery of, the consultative intervention-planning process; number of “traditional” multifactored evaluations conducted in the school; and actual student goal attainment. Significant relationships were found between structural and procedural aspects of team functioning and a number of these outcomes but not with student goal attainment. Results are discussed in terms of future research directions.

Utilization of evidence-based practice by registered occupational therapists

Although the use of evidence-based practice (EBP) is presently on the rise, there have been limited studies examining its use by occupational therapists within the US. The purpose of this study was to examine the use of EBP among registered occupational therapists in the occupational therapy intervention planning process. This descriptive study surveyed 500 members of the American Occupational Therapy Association (AOTA), of which 131 participants responded (26%). The results of the study supported the hypothesis that, within the sample studied, a minority of registered occupational therapists in the US utilize EBP in the intervention planning process. Other results included: (1) As level of academic education increased, the view of the importance of research to occupational therapy decreased. (2) As the years of practice increased, the use of research evidence in making clinical decisions decreased. As the occupational therapy profession moves towards utilization of EBP as a professional standard, it is imperative that the profession examines specific strategies to promote the adoption of such practice by its members, including the promotion of competency in evidence utilization, and the valuing of the established clinical reasoning skills of the practitioner while integrating research evidence into intervention planning to support professional practice.

Contextualized behavioral support in early intervention for children with autism and their families.

Parent education programs have become an effective mode of treatment delivery for teaching families effective behavioral strategies to manage challenging behavior in young children with autism. Functional assessment and functional communication training (FCT) are empirically validated procedures that have recently been introduced into parent education programming to help resolve challenging behaviors. The success of these procedures, however, is contingent on family members' ability to integrate them into the specific contexts in which challenging behaviors occur. Consequently, the application of these procedures in home settings necessitates consideration of the family context in the assessment and treatment planning process. A study is presented that investigated the use of information on family context (i.e., caregiving demands, family support, patterns of social interaction) to direct the assessment and intervention planning process. More specifically, information on family context was used to individualize behavioral support plans designed to support family use of functional communication training within important family routines. Through parent-investigator collaboration we individualized the manner in which functional communication training procedures were taught and implemented so they were contextually relevant. Utilizing a multiple baseline design, the challenging behaviors and functional communication of three children with autism were monitored across baseline, intervention (i.e., FCT, and contextulized FCT), and follow-up phases. Multiple routines for each participant were selected and monitored across all phases to evaluate changes in the dependent measures within training and generalization routines. A self-report questionnaire was administered intermittently to parents to determine if consideration of family context improved the "goodness of fit" of the functional communication training treatment packages across FCT and contextualized FCT intervention phases. Results from the study indicate that consideration of family context in the assessment and intervention planning process does not jeopardize and may contribute to the stability and durability of reductions in challenging behavior achieved with functional assessment and functional communication training procedures.

Using community perspectives on youth firearm violence for prevention program planning

The Firearms Connection-The North Philadelphia Firearms Reduction initiative is a youth firearm violence prevention program using a partnership model that links healthcare, criminal justice, business, and social service providers with neighborhood residents and community organizations to identify priorities and develop solutions. The assessment phase helped build the partnerships and engage the community in the planning, implementation, and evaluation of specific interventions. The needs assessment was used to I) specify, the problem of firearm violence in the target community; 2) frame possible solutions in the language of the community; 3) identify community assets and resources for planning, implementation and evaluation; 4) engage key members of the community for participation in the assessment and intervention planning process; and 5) identify appropriate markers for evaluation of progress and outcome. This paper presents the qualitative method of Rapid Participatory Appraisal used for the assessment, the results as related to the specific problem of youth violence, and how the assessment process was used to advance the coalition building process.

Clinical Reasoning Case Studies as Teaching Tools

Students are taught how to apply clinical reasoning methods through a variety of teaching methods, including the use of case studies. Various types of case studies have been described in the literature: paper cases, videotape cases, simulated client cases, and real client cases. This study examined the effectiveness of a new type of paper case study--the clinical reasoning case study--in teaching the clinical reasoning process to occupational therapy students. Four seniors in an undergraduate occupational therapy program completed intervention plans in response to both traditional medical model and clinical reasoning paper case studies. Qualitative methods were used to analyze intervention plans and videotaped discussion about this learning experience. Themes discovered in the data sources suggest that compared with traditional case studies, the clinical reasoning case studies increased the quality of participants' intervention plans, participants' confidence levels about their plans, and participants' understanding of the clinical reasoning process. Participants also reported preferring clinical reasoning case studies over traditional paper case studies. The clinical reasoning case studies are effective teaching tools because they provide students with a holistic picture of the client and his or her occupational therapy treatment. In addition, these case studies model the clinical reasoning process by organizing client information according to the types of clinical reasoning that would be used to gather that information. Occupational therapy educators may find this type of paper case study useful in introducing students to the intervention planning process.