Interventions as tests of family systems theories: marital and family relationships in children's development and psychopathology.

Full Abstract

This paper addresses the role of family-based studies of preventive and therapeutic interventions in our understanding of normal development and psychopathology. The emphasis is on interventions designed to improve parent-child and/or marital relationships as a way of facilitating development and reducing psychopathology in children and adolescents. Intervention designs provide the gold standard for testing causal hypotheses. We begin by discussing the complexity of validating these hypotheses and the implications of the shift from a traditional emphasis on theories of etiology to developmental psychopathology's newer paradigm describing risks --> pathways --> outcomes. We summarize correlational studies that document the fact that difficult and ineffective parent-child and marital relationships function as risk factors for children's cognitive, social, and emotional problems in childhood and adolescence. We then review prevention studies and therapy evaluation studies that establish some specific parenting and marital variables as causal risk factors with respect to these outcomes. Our discussion focuses on what intervention studies have revealed so far and suggests an agenda for further research.

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Author information

Author/s: Cowan, Philip A (PA); Cowan, Carolyn Pape (CP);

Affiliation: Institute of Human Development, University of California, Berkeley 94720-1690, USA. pcowan(-atsign-)socrates.berkeley.edu

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Review

Journal: Development and psychopathology (Dev Psychopathol), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2002-; vol 14 (issue 4) : pp 731-59

Dates: Created 2003/01/28; Completed 2003/05/01; Revised 2004/11/17;

PMID: 12549702, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 11/6/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Achievement
Adaptation, Psychological
Child
Developmental Disabilities - psychology; therapy
Family - psychology
Family Relations

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