Evaluation of the results of an intervention with mothers/caretakers: contributions of the training in social skills

Abstract

Studies have demonstrated how behavior problems are increasingly related to deficits in the parents’ social educative skills (PSES). The present study evaluates the effects of an intervention program which aimed at the promotion of educational skills and the consequent prevention of behavioral problems. Control evaluations, pre-test, and post-test were carried out using three different instruments: the HSE-P checklist questionnaire, Inventory of Social Skills (Inventário de Habilidades Sociais, IHS – Del Prette) and CBCL – Children Behavior Checklist (Bordin et al., 1995). Two mothers and a grandmother, who is the legal responsible for her grandchild, participated in this study. The data analysis was performed in order to compare the results from the three different evaluations. The results showed changes in the parents’ socio-educative skills for all three participants following the intervention within three categories: communication, expressiveness and confrontation, limit setting. The new parental skills resulted in a reduction of behavioral problems and an increase of socially adequate responses from the children. A suggested limitation was the restricted use of disclosure measures, although two contributions can be pointed, viz. the utilization of a variety of tools and the realization of different evaluations, whose delineation is still scarce in the literature.

Key words: behavioral medicine, child psychology, education.