Parent Education Program Evaluation: A Review of the Literature

This review of parent education evaluations examined three approaches to parent education: behaviour modification, parent effectiveness training (PET), and the Adlerian approach. Our review demonstrated that on the majority of outcome measures, whether examining behaviour or attitude change or change in family dynamics, results were either mixed or not statistically significant. The most frequent methodological problems were lack of random assignment, failure to match groups, absence of consideration of experimenter bias, and failure to incorporate sufficiently large numbers of individuals into the design. There was also an absence of long-term follow-ups and control groups, whether a no-treatment or placebo group that was truly independent of the program. Finally these evaluations are limited in their ability to match outcome to process and to parent characteristics and thus hindered in their ability to plan effective parent education programs.