Research That Matters (January 17 - 20, 2008)

Purpose: Outcome findings are reported for a federally funded comprehensive evaluative of a prison-based parent education program. The program was designed to reduce the potential for child abuse and neglect and to increase protective factors such as positive parent-child relationships and supportive family environments for fathers imprisoned at a state minimum security facility. The researchers translated the established goals of the parenting program into testable hypotheses and further identified and measured the service delivery activities and costs of the program to assess program successes and costs.

Methods The parenting program evaluated here, a 12-week series of parent education classes, delivered 3 times per year to an average of 20 incarcerated fathers per series was well suited to the recurrent institutional-cycle quasi-experimental design described by Shadish, Cook, & Campbell (2002). A program effect is suggested by patterns of statistically signficant pre-post test change in different groups over time.

Our primary outcome measure was the Child Abuse Potential Inventory (CAPI), a 160-item self-report inventory with six factor scales measuring distress, rigidity, unhappiness, problems with child and self, problems with family. The instrument provides a clinical cut score and is able to identify respondents with problematic social desirability scores (Milner, 1994).

We collected pre-post test data for 9 series of parent education classes from fathers who volunteered to participate in classes over a three year period. Fathers (n = 140) who attended a minimum of 10 classes and who had non-problematic CAPI social desirability scores comprised the data set.

Results: Overall, 47% of the sample was at risk for child abusing behaviors at pre-test. At post-test, there was a statistically significant decrease in child abuse potential for the combined series (t = 3.94; p =.00) and for Series 1 (t = 2.9; p =.06), Series 4 (t = 4.04; p =.00), Series 8 (t = 1.90; p =.07), Series 9, (t = 4.15; p =.00). Additional analysis revealed that fathers at greatest risk for child abusing behaviors at the beginning of the classes received the greatest benefit from the program. External factors -- demographic characteristics, family or criminal history, father/child relationships – were not related to change scores, providing further evidence of program effect. Factor analysis distinguished a Cognitive Learning and an Emotional Learning component of the curriculum that were empirically related to specific program effects. Cost and service delivery data provided an estimated cost of $570 to decrease the child abuse potential of one father in the program.

Implications: The increase in prison rates among young men as a result of ‘war on drugs' has been accompanied by exponential growth in the number of children and families with an incarcerated male parent (Gadsen & Rethemeyer, 2003). Imprisonment disrupts family ties, parent/child bonds, and results in prisoners who, when released, are substantially less able to find employment, marry or maintain healthy family relationships. Replication of this prison-based parenting program should be considered for other minimum security prisons as a viable intervention to help fathers parent from prison and maintain positive child-father relationships.