Sunday, 16 January 2005 - 8:45 AM

This presentation is part of: Violent Behavior in Adolescents

Taking a Look Inside Skill-building Groups: A Content Analysis of Leader Behaviors and Child Responses in a School-based Violence Prevention Project

Taking a Look Inside Skill-building Groups: A Content Analysis of Leader Behaviors and Child Responses in a School-based Violence Prevention Project.

Purpose:

School-based programs that teach methods for controlling anger, change beliefs about the acceptability of violence and offer opportunities for modeling and practicing pro-social skills have shown promise in decreasing aggressive and antisocial behaviors in children and adolescents (Deffenbacher, Lynch, Oetting & Kemper, 1996; Fraser, Galinsky & Smokowski, 2001; Letendre, Henry & Tolan, 2003). Concerns have been raised, however, that the use of standardized curricula actually interferes with the development of the group milieu that supports mutual aid and problem solving (Gitterman, 1999). Dishion, McCord & Poulin (1999) have also suggested that such groups can actually reinforce aggressive and anti-social behaviors within the group. No studies have examined the process of the skill-building groups in an effort to decipher the specific leader behaviors that contribute to the engagement of group participants and development of the group milieu where children can interact in cooperative and non-aggressive ways. The paper describes an exploratory study that examined the content of videotapes of group sessions of an urban violence prevention project with elementary-aged children to determine the specific leader behaviors that were used to facilitate the skill building groups and the response of the children to these behaviors.

Methods:

The sample was composed of eight videotapes of beginning, middle, and ending sessions of a 16-week skill-building intervention. Six leaders (two per team) and 18 children were involved in the project. The leader teams were mixed in gender and ethnicity and had varying educational levels and experience with the project. One group was ethnically diverse and two groups were homogenous (either African-American or Mexican-American). Leaders were matched to the groups by ethnicity and gender. Transcripts were made of each group session.

Three categories of leader behaviors were developed for analysis: management of behaviors, encouragement of cohesion, and teaching strategies. Children’s positive responses to leader interactions were coded as laughter in the group and verbal responses. Two raters analyzed each leader’s interactions and children’s responses using both transcripts and videotaped sessions.

Findings:

All leaders maintained fidelity to the standardized curriculum, despite the varying length of session time. The teams of leaders differed in the ways that they facilitated the group sessions. The percentage of leader behaviors in the three coding categories were: behavior management (6-11%); development of cohesion (<1-6%) and teaching strategies (85% -86%). The children’s responses to leader content varied by group.

Implications for Social Work:

Children do respond to the structure and learning in skill based groups. Time management is an enormous challenge in groups driven by curricula. Research needs to attend to balancing the skill-building component of the groups with the mutual aid that promotes cooperation and helpfulness amongst children. Training of leaders in group work skills can increase the applicability of skill-building to situations as they occur in the group session. Attention to culture and its influence on collective, group learning can enhance learning of these skills.

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