Interventies voor kinderen en jongeren met gedragsmatige en emotionele problemen: Een vergelijking op elementen van hulpverlening [Interventions for children and adolescents with behavioural and emotional problems: a comparison regarding practice elements]

Knowledge on the content of interventions for children and adolescents with behavioural and emotional problems is important for a better understanding of the effectiveness of child-, parent-, or family-directed forms of care and treatment. It is often not precisely known which ‘practice elements’ contribute to changes in the behaviour of children, adolescents and their parents. Some studies suggest that interventions, although they have different names and labels, display a highly similar pattern of ‘practice elements’ carried out by professionals. Therefore, the aim of this study was to provide insight into the content of interventions offered in one catchment area. More specifically, we wished to find out whether and to what degree these interventions display similarities and differences in their ‘practice elements’. Furthermore, we analyzed to what degree the interventions were conceptually and empirically founded.
We assessed the ‘evidence-base’ of the interventions offered by four care organizations in the Netherlands' province of Groningen by using criteria formulated in the Database Effective Interventions (DEI). The interventions were divided into seven main types of support. Twenty practice elements for each main type of support were collected using intervention descriptions included in the DEI. Experienced professionals scored whether the 20 practice elements were accurate or inaccurate in representing methodical aspects of all the interventions that were offered within their own care organization. Per main type of support the scores were analyzed and those interventions that scored similarly on content were regrouped into intervention clusters.
Of the 91 interventions, 35 were ‘well-defined' (38,5%) and 56 were ‘poorly defined' (61,5%). The degree of clustering of ‘well-defined’ interventions (44,1% reduction) was somewhat smaller than the degree of clustering of ‘poorly defined’ interventions (52,8% reduction).
We conclude that interventions included in this study have substantially overlapping practice elements. More knowledge on these elements may serve to support further improvement in the array of interventions offered to children with behavioural and emotional problems, and to a regrouping of interventions into more comprehensive ‘treatment families’.