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The Coping Power Program is a multicomponent preventive intervention for aggressive children that uses the contextual sociocognitive model as its conceptual framework. The sociocognitive model concentrates on the contextual parenting processes and on children’s sequential cognitive processing. It posits that aggressive children have cognitive distortions at the appraisal stage of sociocognitive processing because of their difficulties in encoding incoming social information and in accurately interpreting social events and others’ intentions. These children also have cognitive deficiencies at the problem solution stage of sociocognitive processing; they tend to generate maladaptive solutions for perceived problems. The contextual sociocognitive model also emphasizes parenting processes in the development and escalation of problem behaviors. Child aggressive behavior arises most fundamentally out of early contextual experiences with parents who provide harsh or irritable discipline, poor problem-solving, vague commands, and poor monitoring of their children’s behavior.
On the basis of this contextual sociocognitive model, Coping Power Program was developed with parent and child components. Intervention covers 15 months (the 2nd half of 1 academic year and all of the next). The child component includes eight intervention sessions in the 1st intervention year and 25 in the 2nd intervention year. Each group session lasts 40–60 minutes. The sessions include four to six boys and are co-led by a program specialist with a master’s or doctoral degree in psychology or social work and by a school guidance counselor. The Coping Power child component was derived primarily from a previously evaluated 18-session Anger Coping Program. The Coping Power child component sessions emphasize the following: behavioral and personal goal-setting, awareness of feelings and associated physiological arousal, use of coping self-statements, distraction techniques and relaxation methods when provoked and made angry, organizational and study skills, perspective taking and attribution retraining, social problem–solving skills, and dealing with peer pressure and neighborhood-based problems by using refusal skills.
The parent component consists of 16 group sessions over the same 15-month intervention period. It is delivered in groups of four to six single parents or couples. Groups usually meet at the boys’ schools and are led by two staff persons. Assertive attempts are made to promote parent attendance and to include both mothers and fathers in parent groups. The content of the parent component was derived from social-learning-theory–based parent training programs. Parents learn skills for identifying prosocial and disruptive behavioral targets in their children, rewarding appropriate child behaviors, giving effective instructions, establishing age-appropriate rules and expectations for children, applying effective consequences to negative child behavior, and establishing ongoing family communication through weekly family meetings. In addition, parents learn to support the sociocognitive skills that children learn in the Coping Power child component and to use stress-management skills to remain calm and in control during stressful or irritating disciplinary interactions with their children.
The evaluation used a classical experimental design. A total of 1,578 fourth and fifth grade boys were screened for aggression, using a multiple-gating approach. Of those screened, 183 boys across two cohorts were selected for the study and randomly assigned to the child intervention–only condition (n=60), the child-plus-parent intervention condition (n=60), or the control condition (n=63). The children in the control condition received services as usual within their schools. There were no significant baseline differences between conditions for any of the variables, indicating that (even accounting for attrition) the three conditions were comparable at baseline.
Screening and baseline assessments were conducted in winter 1997 with two annual cohorts of fourth and fifth grade boys. Intervention began in spring of that academic year and continued throughout the following academic year, when the subjects were then in either fifth or sixth grade.
One-year follow-up assessments were collected 2 summers after intervention (when boys had completed either sixth or seventh grade). Five outcome measures were assessed: covert delinquency, overt delinquency, parent-reported substance use, child-reported substance use, and school behavior. Two of the outcome variables were assessed only at Time 3 (parent-reported substance use and school behavior) and the three other outcome variables had Time 1 scores that were included in analyses (child-reported substance use, covert delinquency, and overt delinquency). Overt and covert delinquency was assessed by boys’ self-reports of their delinquent behavior, using the National Youth Survey. The participants reported their rate of use of alcohol and of marijuana during the past year. These items were converted to binary variables (use, nonuse) and summed to create a youth self-report of substance use. Parents’ reports of youth substance use were assessed, with four items indicating the frequency and amount of alcohol and marijuana use that youths displayed in the past year. Standardized scores for each item were summed to create a parent-reported substance use score. Teachers rated children’s school behavioral improvement at school during the follow-up year. This Time 3 measure was the mean of two items, indicating children’s improvement in behavioral problems and in their problem-solving and anger management, using a 0 to 6 rating scale (from has gotten worse to great improvement).
The evaluation results indicate that the Coping Power Program had significant impact on three of five follow-up outcomes. Specifically, boys who had participated in the program along with their parents had lower rates of self-reported covert delinquent behavior (theft, fraud, property damage) at the time of the 1-year follow-up, though there were no intervention effects on overt delinquency (assault, robbery). Moreover, the positive intervention effect on covert delinquency was apparent only for the children who had been in the Coping Power condition that had both the parent and child components.
The overall intervention results for substance use were mixed. Though there were no intervention effects on boys’ self-reported substance use, there were intervention effects on parent-reported substance. Thus, it appears that the Coping Power intervention did produce follow-up effects at least on the type of youth substance use that would be most apparent to parents.
The program also had significant follow-up effects on teachers’ ratings of children’s improvements in school behavioral problems during the academic year after the program was completed. Boys who had been in the program demonstrated increasing behavioral improvements in school throughout the follow-up year, suggesting that intervention-produced changes in children’s abilities to cope effectively with difficult peer and adult conflicts had continued to grow in the year following intervention.
Finally, both the parent and child components appear to have important roles in influencing boys’ functioning at a 1-year follow-up. While the child component influenced improvements in boys’ behavior at school, the parent component appeared to be the most critical intervention influence on boys’ covert delinquency and substance use at follow-up. In addition, there was evidence that Coping Power had clearer effects on white boys’ parent-rated substance use and school behavior functioning than was the case for minority children, most of whom were African-American.
Lochman, John E., and Karen C. Wells. 2002a. “Contextual Social–Cognitive Mediators and Child Outcome: A Test of the Theoretical Model in the Coping Power Program.” Development and Psychopathology 14:971–93.
———. 2002b. “The Coping Power Program at the Middle School Transition: Universal and Indicated Prevention Effects.” Psychology of Addictive Behaviors 16:S40–S54.
———. 2003. “Effectiveness Study of Coping Power and Classroom Intervention With Aggressive Children: Outcomes at a 1-year Follow-Up.” Behavior Therapy 34:493–515.
———. 2004. “The Coping Power Program for Preadolescent Aggressive Boys and Their Parents: Outcome Effects at the 1–Year Follow-Up.” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 4:571–78.
Lochman, John E., Karen C. Wells, and M. Murray. (in press). “The Coping Power Program: Preventive Intervention at the Middle School Transition.” In Patrick H. Tolan, José Szapocznik, and S. Sambrano (eds.). “Preventing Substance Abuse: 3 to 14.” Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
John E. Lochman
Department of Psychology
Univeristy of Alabama
383 Gordon Palmer Hall, P.O. Box 870348
Tuscaloosa, AL 35487
Phone: (205) 348-7678
Fax: (205) 348-8648
E-mail: jlocjman@gp.as.ua.edu
John E. Lochman
Department of Psychology
University of Alabama
383 Gordon Palmer Hall, P.O. Box 870348
Tuscaloosa, AL 35487
Phone: (205) 348-7678
Fax: (205) 348-8648
E-mail: jlocjman@gp.as.ua.edu
