Parent Management of Organization,Time Management,and Planning Deficits among Adolescents with ADHD

Organization, Time Management, and Planning (OTP) problems are a key mechanism of academic failure for adolescents with ADHD. Parents may be well positioned to promote remediation of these deficits; yet, almost nothing is known about OTP management behaviors among parents of middle and high school students with ADHD. In a sample of 299 well-diagnosed adolescents with ADHD, a measure of parental OTP management was psychometrically validated. Latent Class Analysis was conducted to detect distinct patterns of parental OTP management and yielded four unique classes: Parental Control (18.7 %), Parent-Teen Collaboration (20.4 %), Homework Assistance (20.4 %), and Uninvolved (40.5 %). Logistic Regression analyses indicated that maladaptive parental OTP strategies were related to higher levels of parent and adolescent psychopathology. Parental OTP management did not relate to current adolescent OTP skills or GPA, indicating that parents did not select OTP management strategies in immediate response to adolescent functioning. Implications for parent-directed intervention are discussed.     

The Analysis of Count Data: A Gentle Introduction to Poisson Regression and Its Alternatives

Count data reflect the number of occurrences of a behavior in a fixed period of time (e.g., number of aggressive acts by children during a playground period). In cases in which the outcome variable is a count with a low arithmetic mean (typically < 10), standard ordinary least squares regression may produce biased results. We provide an introduction to regression models that provide appropriate analyses for count data. We introduce standard Poisson regression with an example and discuss its interpretation. Two variants of Poisson regression, overdispersed Poisson regression and negative binomial regression, are introduced that may provide more optimal results when a key assumption of standard Poisson regression is violated. We also discuss the problems of excess zeros in which a subgroup of respondents who would never display the behavior are included in the sample and truncated zeros in which respondents who have a zero count are excluded by the sampling plan. We provide computer syntax for our illustrations in SAS and SPSS. The Poisson family of regression models provides improved and now easy to implement analyses of count data.

[Supplementary materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Journal of Personality Assessment for the following free supplemental resources: the data set used to illustrate Poisson regression in this article, which is available in three formats—a text file, an SPSS database, or a SAS database.]