An investigation of the relationship between maternal reporting style and parenting behavior

In this investigation, the relationship between maternal report style in clinic discussions and parenting behavior in the home is explored. Eleven mother - child dyads were followed through a treatment program for multistressed families with children with conduct problems. Families were divided into three treatment conditions: parent training only; parent training and synthesis teaching; parent training, synthesis teaching and friendship liaison. Synthesis teaching is a program developed by Wahler and Dumas (1989) to enhance the impact of parent training by helping a mother become a more attentive observer and articulate reporter of her experience. Previous research (Wahler, 1980; Webster-Stratton, 1985) has indicated that families facing multiple stressors in addition to child conduct problems often do not benefit or maintain gains made from parent training programs. Wahler and Dumas suggest that a global and inaccurate maternal attentional style may impede parent training success and that maternal verbal reports may provide an index of attentional style. Friendship liaison was designed to increase maintenance of treatment gains through involving a friend in the last phase of therapy as an identified social support that would be available after the termination of treatment. The goal of this study, in addition to examining the impact of synthesis teaching as a supplement to parent training, was to determine if maternal report style could be measured in a meaningful and reliable way and, using this measure, see if there was any predictive relationship between verbal behavior in a treatment setting and parenting behavior in the home. A coding system was developed to provide a measure of verbal report style and parenting behavior was measured through home observations. While several group differences were found in report style and parenting behavior suggesting that synthesis teaching may increase parent training benefits, results also indicated that the coding system for verbal reports showed little predictive ability for parenting behavior outside a clinic setting.