Evaluation of a networked self-testing program

The use of a computerized, multiple-choice test bank to present practice and assessment tests on a network was evaluated with 46 men and 119 women from a first-year class in psychology. A correlation of .65 (p < .001) between scores on a traditional paper-and-pencil test and scores on a computerized test provided some validity for the computerized assessment. Regression analysis showed that ability (previous academic performance) and motivation (number of practice tests taken) accounted for 73% of the explained variance in computerized test scores. Sex differences did not enter the regression equation significantly.     

Evaluation of a youth suicide prevention school program

Adolescent suicide is a subject of increasing national concern. In California, this problem was addressed through the implementation of a three-year youth suicide prevention school program established by legislative mandate in 1983. Findings for the first two years of the program indicate significant gains in understanding of youth suicide prevention techniques for those high school students who completed a four-hour training course. School staff and parents completing 90-minute youth suicide awareness seminars indicated that they most appreciated receiving practical advice and resources they could use in responding to a potentially suicidal young person.     

Evaluation of a comprehensive inpatient rational-emotive therapy program: Some preliminary data

Mental health practitioners are faced with a profound challenge surrounding the prevalence of adult mental disorders, the need for inpatient treatment programs, and the costs of such programs. This paper describes the development of an adult inpatient psychiatric program based on Rational-Emotive Therapy. Specific elements of this program are described briefly, and preliminary outcome data presented on 372 patients. Concerns and future directions are also discussed. Development of adult inpatient psychiatric programs based on Rational-Emotive Therapy would appear to be one method of providing effective and cost-efficient treatment within the current cost-containment atmosphere of psychiatric treatment.Dr. Nottingham is an Associate Fellow and Approved Supervisor of the Institute for Rational-Emotive Therapy. He is in independent practice with Germantown Psychological Associates, P.C. and is Director of Psychology at Parkwood Hospital, Olive Branch, MS. Dr. Neimeyer is an Associate Professor and Director of Clinical Training in the Department of Psychology of Memphis State University. He has written extensively in the areas of cognitive and constructivist psychotherapy, and is co-editor of the International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology.The authors would like to thank Kat Bagley, Joe Grillo, Ivey Bright, Brooke Bensen, Cathy Michas, Brad Barris, Lori Passmore, David Wilkins, and Dee Conrad for their help with data collection. Additionally, without the assistance and support of the Parkwood Hospital administration and staff, neither this treatment program nor this paper could have been developed.Portions of this paper based on earlier data analyses were presented at the Mississippi Psychological Association Convention, September, 1990. This research was conducted at Parkwood Hospital.     

Free writing: Evaluation of a preventive program with elementary school children

Eight-session free-writing workshops focusing on developing elementary schoolchildren's use of different describing words, reference to self, expression and clarification of feelings, and expression of stress responses were introduced to 324 fifth-grade children living on the northern border of Israel where the probability of war-related crisis is particularly high. The purpose of the study was to evaluate (a) the effectiveness of the workshop and (b) the applicability of free writing in an actual stressful event. Results indicated that the workshop group exhibited higher mean scores than the nonintervention control group on all behavior measures, both after the workshop and following a stressful event (shelling of the town). The theoretical background for free-writing conceptualization is given and the implications of the results are discussed in light of large-scale preventive intervention.     

Evaluation of a healthy-weight treatment program for bulimia nervosa: a preliminary randomized trial

Objective: Conduct a randomized treatment trial to test whether healthy dieting maintains bulimic symptoms or effectively reduces this eating disturbance.

Methods: Female participants (n=85) with full- and sub-threshold bulimia nervosa were randomly assigned to a 6-session healthy dieting intervention or waitlist condition and assessed through 3-month follow-up.

Results: Relative to control participants, intervention participants showed modest weight loss during treatment and demonstrated significant improvements in bulimic symptoms that persisted through follow-up.

Discussion: These preliminary results suggest that this intervention shows potential for the treatment of bulimia nervosa and may be worthy of future refinement and evaluation. Results also provide experimental evidence that dieting behaviors do not maintain bulimia nervosa, suggesting the need to reconsider maintenance models for this eating disorder.     

Efficacy of brief telephone psychotherapy with callers to a suicide hotline

The efficacy of two types of theapy conducted exclusively over the telephone was studied. Clients (N=55) were recruited from a pool of callers to a suicide hotline and were randomly assigned to a waiting list control (WC) or Solution Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) or Common Factors Therapy (CFT). It was hypothesized that improvements would be significantly higher in the two therapy conditions compared to the waitlist control and SFBT would be significantly more efficacious than CFT. Results confirmed that improvement was significantly higher in the two treatment conditions compared to the waitlist control, but no difference in improvement was found between SFBT and CFT. The implications of these findings for suicide hotlines are discussed.     

Evaluation of the effects of a childhood depression prevention program

The study aimed to design and evaluate a program for the prevention of childhood depression (“Pozik-Bizi” [in English, “Live-Happily”]), comparing its effects with a socio-emotional intervention program based on cooperative play. The sample comprised 420 students aged 7 to 10?years from the Basque Country, 51.9% were randomly assigned to the experimental condition (“Pozik-Bizi”) program and 48.1% to the control group (“Play program”). Using a pretest-posttest repeated measures experimental design, 7 evaluation instruments were administered. When comparing the two interventions, it was confirmed that those who participated in the “Pozik-Bizi” program significantly decreased their level of clinical maladjustment, school maladjustment, emotional, and behavioral problems, and they increased positive behaviors that inhibit depression. However, the cooperative play program improved self-concept and social skills significantly more than the “Pozik-Bizi” program. The effect size in all the variables was small. The discussion analyzes the effectiveness of specific programs of prevention of childhood depression versus global programs of social-emotional development. This work provides a program to prevent childhood depression that has been shown to be effective in the reduction of clinical variables. In addition, this study confirms the positive potential of programs of cooperative play, to increase self-concept and social skills.     

Acute care treatment services (acts): A model program for providing acute psychiatric services in a homelike environment in an institutional setting

The Acute Care Treatment Services (ACTS) Program at Anna Mental Health and Developmental Center in Anna, Illinois, offers a unique, homelike environment for many of the institution's acute recipients. The relaxed, natural environment (i.e., pleasant cottages free from the disturbing behaviors often displayed by chronically mentally ill recipients) aims to stabilize acute recipients, expedite their return to the community, and reduce the likelihood of their later rehospitalization by linking them with necessary community mental health resources. Chisquare analyses demonstrated significantly fewer subsequent hospitalizations for ACTS recipients after their second readmission than that of statewide comparison groups. The viability of treating acute mental illness in a natural setting on an institution's grounds is discussed.     

Stress-management training: Evaluation of effects on school psychological services

School psychologists participated in a cognitive-behavioral stress-management training program. The data showed decreases in self-reported anxiety and increases in job satisfaction of school psychologists as a result of the training. In addition, teacher satisfaction with school psychological services increased after participation in teacher inservice workshops generated as a result of training the school psychologists.     

Promoting healthy food consumption among young children: Evaluation of a multi-component nutrition education program

This study was an outcome evaluation of a multi-component nutrition education program for African American kindergarten and first grade students attending an under-resourced urban school. The program focused on increasing fruit and vegetable knowledge and vegetable consumption during school lunch. It included a classroom-based knowledge change component, a lunchtime-based behavior-change component, and a home component. This program was unique in that natural helpers in the school (i.e., paraprofessionals) were enlisted as agents of behavior change. Findings indicated that the program was considered socially valid from the perspectives of students, teachers, and paraprofessional community assistants. Implementation integrity was acceptable for the classroom intervention, but highly variable for the lunchtime intervention. Program outcomes demonstrated that knowledge change was high, but behavior change was variable. Inconsistent behavioral effects appeared to be related in part to the variable level of intervention integrity. The challenges of promoting intervention integrity with paraprofessionals were discussed, and strategies for improving integrity were outlined.     

An evaluation of crisis hotline outcomes. Part 2: Suicidal callers

In this study we evaluated the effectiveness of telephone crisis services/hotlines, examining proximal outcomes as measured by changes in callers' suicide state from the beginning to the end of their calls to eight centers in the U.S. and again within 3 weeks of their calls. Between March 2003 and July 2004, 1,085 suicide callers were assessed during their calls and 380 (35.0%) participated in the follow-up assessment. Several key findings emerged. Seriously suicidal individuals reached out to telephone crisis services. Significant decreases in suicidality were found during the course of the telephone session, with continuing decreases in hopelessness and psychological pain in the following weeks. A caller's intent to die at the end of the call was the most potent predictor of subsequent suicidality. The need to heighten outreach strategies and improve referrals is highlighted.     

Evaluation of two test-anxiety reduction treatments in a secondary prevention program

The study evaluated the effectiveness of both a new anxiety management training program and a cognitive modification procedure as part of a secondary prevention effort to identify and treat test anxiety early in the academic career of college students. Subjects were 40 college freshmen who had been identified as high test-anxious in an initial mail-out survey of the Test Anxiety scale. Subjects were randomly assigned to three experimental conditions: anxiety management training, a cognitive modification procedure, and a no-treatment control group. Results indicated that both the cognitive modification and anxiety management training treatments were effective in reducing test anxiety on a posttreatment administration of the Test Anxiety scale. Especially interesting, a significant difference in academic performance emerged between treatment and control groups three semesters after treatment, underscoring the preventive value of the program.     

Evaluation of Crisis Intervention Programs and Personnel: A Summary and Critique*

ABSTRACT: Many of the suicide prevention centers that developed throughout the country during the last decade have evolved into general crisis intervention services. At the same time, they have stimulated the development of a wide variety of agencies that utilize nonprofessional volunteers who, primarily through telephone contact, provide helping services to people in crisis. This paper presents a critique of three particular problem areas relating to the use of volunteer personnel, along with a summary of research aimed at providing new technologies for their solution. Methods have been developed for rating on-the-job performance of crisis intervention workers, based upon criteria that are thought to have general application to crisis intervention centers. Efforts to describe personality characteristics of volunteers are reported, along with suggestions for the direction of additional investigations. Finally, the issue of assessing the outcome of crisis intervention cases is summarized. A four-phase conceptualization of the crisis intervention process is proposed, and appropriate measures of outcome at each point in the process are suggested. The overall significance of this type of research is discussed in terms of the need for standards by which to evaluate crisis intervention services.     

Crisis centers and hotlines: a survey

Crisis centers and hotlines are relatively new approaches to the nation's growing concern for mental health problems. In order to provide information for those beginning a center, 253 centers were surveyed regarding five major aspects of crisis center operations: screening procedures for telephone listener-counselor applicants, training procedures, services offered, types of calls received, and financing. Resources for further information and for better communication among centers are identified.