Enhancing the effects of the Positive Thinking Program: a longitudinal evaluation in 8-9 year old children

Thirty primary schools will be selected from all the Independent Goverments and private schools in Perth Metropolitan area. They will be assigned at random to either the intervention or control condition. School principals will be invited to participate with the understanding that follow-up assessments will take place at post-test, 6 months and 18, months. A visit and presentation to each of the school principals and teachers involved in the implementation will then follow whereby the rationale and methodology are explained. This presentation will highlight the manner in which the program can be integrated into the regular school curriculum and will encourage individual teachers to become supporters and advocates for the program. The teachers will be trained in running groups and the principles of the "Positive Thinking" over a 1 day (8 hours) training course run by clinical psychologists who are members of the research team. The training workshop involves information, activity demonstrations, activity practice, feedback and implementation planning. Teachers in the intervention condition will be provided with programs manual and resources. The full involvement of Year 4 &5 teachers in the selected schools will be critical to the program's success so time will be taken to emphasize the benefits and outcomes for teachers. They will complete an implementation checklist after each session to assess program integrity. 5 x 1 hour coaching sessions will be offered with the intervention schools and teachers. Parents will be addressed as part of the usual parent teacher meetings that are held at the beginning of the year. This project will be fully explained and any questions that are raised will be answered. The active consent of children and parents will be sought after the study has been fully explained to them via school meetings and formal information and consent form. In April 2010, the assessment battery will be administered to the children in the 15 intervention schools to provide baseline pre-test measures of depressive symptoms, attribution style, anxiety, demographic and emotional competence. At the same time, two trained psychologists will assess any child scoring over 17 on the Children's Depression Inventory (CDI) and 42 on the Spence Children's Anxiety Scale (SCAS) using The Anxiety Disorders Interview Schedule for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th Edition(DSM-IV): Child version (ADIS-C). Follow-up times with the children will be organised in a confidential manner to avoid stigmatisation. For cases where depressive or anxiety disorders are identified, parents will be contacted, and the results of the assessment will be discussed with them. Identified children will be referred for psychological assistance if parents request this. The same procedure will be repeated at the 6 and 18 month follow-up intervals. And additional reply paid envelopes will be provided so that parents can seal their responses. After each follow-up session, a newsletter will be sent to parents and teachers thanking for their involvement, updating the progress, and collecting any changes of address information from parents. The weekly intervention sessions will be run in the usual class room groups and the interview session will focus on confidentiality. The mixed sex groups will be conducted by teachers at the school at designated times that are convenient over 10 weekly one-hour sessions. Process measures for children will be administered at the conclusion of each session. The social validity of the program will be measured by the use of social acceptability questionnaires for all key stakeholders, children, parents, and teachers. The instruments that will be used are: 1) Children's Attributional Style Questionnaire (CASQ; Seligman et al.,1984), 2) CDI (Kovacs, 1992), 3) SCAS (Spence,1998), 4) The Assessment of Children's Emotional Skills (ACES; Schultz, Trentacosta, Izard, Leaf, & Mostow, 2004), 5) ADIS-C (Silverman & Albano, 1996), 6) The Extended Strengths & Difficulties Questionnaires (SDQ-P; Goodman, 1999), 7) Implementation Checklist assessing the degree that teachers have covered the specified information in AOP:PTS program and 8) Demographic information on socioeconomic status, ethnic origin, family structure, family health and history of mental health problems. Administration of the program will be closely monitored by the chief-investigators for adherence to assigned intervention program via log books, reports, interviews and observations made by research assistants and friendly follow-up sessions to help teachers get through the program and by addressing any problems that they might have. Dosage effects will be measured via attendance of students at session.