Results
Results indicate that the Coping Power Program is effective in reducing children’s aggressive behavior and preventing their substance use. Specific findings include:
- Reduced substance use at end of intervention and at one-year follow-up
- Reduced delinquent behavior at one-year follow-up
- Reductions in aggressive behavior at home and at school by end of intervention
- Reductions in aggressive behavior at school at 1- and 3-year follow-ups
- Improved social competence
- Compared to children of similar risk status who do not receive Coping Power, students who participate in Coping Power have relatively better Language Arts outcomes 2 years after completing the program
Benefits
In children, the Coping Power Program:
- Reduces aggressive behavior
- Improves behavioral functioning at school
- Improves children’s social competence and social information processing
- Improves internal locus of control for successfully attaining goals
- Increases ability to resolve problems
In parents, the Coping Power Program:
- Improves and increases parental involvement
- Improves provision of consistent discipline.
Outcomes
- Significant improvements in teacher-rated school behavior and significant reductions in parent-rated proactive aggressive behavior for Coping Power students alone, apart from the embedded universal intervention, in comparison to controls.
- Significantly greater increases in teacher-rated aggressive behavior and decreases in aggression towards peers and substance use for Combined Universal-Intervention students, compared to controls.
- Significantly greater improvement of the intervention group over a three-year follow-up period on teacher-rated aggression and teacher-rated academics.
- Significant reductions in delinquency at follow-up and in substance use of older children and moderate risk children.
- Significant mediating effects in support of the theoretical model for delinquency and school behavior; marginally significant mediating effects for substance use.
- Lower rates of assaultive behaviors and externalizing behavior problems (when counselors received training feedback).
- Significant improvements among a universal sample of first- and second-grade students at posttest for prosocial behavior, hyperactivity, and overall stress (or total problems).
- Significant improvements two years post-intervention in language arts grades of both regular students and students receiving special education services.
The Coping Power program has been evaluated in four grant-funded intervention research studies, and has been translated and disseminated in clinical trials in the Netherlands, and in a residential school for deaf children.
Data so far shows that the Coping Power program has produced significant preventive effects in children’s substance use and a number of improvements in the predictor variables presumed to mediate substance use. By the end of intervention, even though relatively few sixth graders were using substances overall, the Coping Power program had led children to have significantly lower levels of substance use (an overall score of tobacco, alcohol and marijuana use) than did control children (6% of Coping Power children versus 17% of control children).
Teachers rated the Coping Power intervention children as having improvements in social skills, intervention children perceived that their social competence had improved, and intervention children tended to have less aggressive beliefs and were less angered by social problems. Teachers also rated the intervention children as having improved behavior, and both teachers and parents rated the intervention children as having lower levels of proactive aggression by post-intervention.
Intervention effects on school bonding were more limited, although intervention children tended to perceive they were more academically competent. Intervention parents had become more supportively involved with their children.