Technique Is Not Enough (TINE) - British Psychological Society

The losses that a recession can bring to family life can have a huge impact where familiesare living in pre-existing stressful circumstances. These include marginalisation, socialisolation, poverty, being from a minority racial or religious background, not being a nativelocal language speaker or having legal immigrant status. The way in which these losses areunderstood within families can also be an important factor in determining the degree oftheir impact because the interpretation of the causes of economic loss are mediated throughindividual’s responses to their pre-existing social circumstances (Hill, 1958; Boss, 2002).This is important because research also indicates that it is family functioning that mediatesthe impact of external stressors on children. Families serve as the primary protective factorfor child functioning in adverse circumstances (Dunst et al., 1988). To protect children wemust protect families. According to socio-ecological theory the same argument that appliesto the mediation of child stress through their experience of their family life also applies totheir experience of their school (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Cicchetti & Lynch, 1993).Experience at school can also be mediated through family life. Depending on issues arisingin the family, children can find school to be a negative or a positive experience; forexample, some children become victims of bullying whereas others thrive in a competitiveethos.Social learning theory tells us that under ordinary circumstances what adults learn in onesetting can fail to transfer to other settings (Bandura, 1977). Therefore both home andschool must be taken into consideration when offering universal support to parents.Hence, promoting a positive overlap between school and home settings can be a significantpsychological factor mediating parenting programme success.To measure the impact of these factors in such complex environments the assessmentmethods and interventions used in parenting programme research must be able to addressthe complexity of the systemic structures that families face in today’s social world.3.2. Evidence-based parenting and family skills training programmesA broad understanding of how children’s problems develop provides insights into boththeir prevention and how to manage later ameliorating interventions. Psychologists havedeveloped parenting programmes which are rigorously scientifically tested. These areknown as ‘evidence-based programmes’. There is an emerging political consensus aboutthe value of these programmes (Welshman, 2010).Several evidence-based parenting programmes now appear in government and researchdatabases. They do so because they have been assessed as meeting an agreed standard ofevidence. Although the debate about the meaning of ‘evidence’ and the validity of‘hierarchies’ of evidence shows no signs of abating (Sheldon & Macdonald, 2009; Gray etal., 2009) there is an emerging consensus in some circles that evidence-based programmesare those that have been shown to be effective when researched rigorously in high-qualityrandomised controlled trials (RCTs) and quasi-experimental studies (Flay et al., 2005;Elliott, 2010). The UNODC recommended list (2010), which is ranked on the number ofRCTs in which a programme has been found to be effective, is shown in Box 1. This is byno means the only or best list of evidence-based programmes, and by using it in this paperwe do not necessarily endorse it, but it has the advantage of being produced by the UN.Technique Is Not Enough 17