Risk, intervention and meaning

The three prior reports describe separate prevention/intervention studies, carefully carried out by well-trained investigative teams. All of the studies deal with parents and infants, where the latter are considered "at risk" for the later development of a variety of problems (for example, emotional disorder, conduct disorder, and learning difficulties). A common idea was to design interventions through home visits to identified parents; results would then be assessed in terms of differential outcomes in the child and in the child's relationship with the parent. We are fortunate because the separate project investigators used a number of common measures and communicated regularly in an attempt to generate a collaborative approach to understanding their databases. But taken together, the reports illustrate that we are at an early stage in our knowledge for doing this kind of research. What has been learned is not so much from differential outcomes as it is from ways of improving research strategies in the face of complex developmental processes. To put it another way, we might say that these investigators present us with a paradox. Intervention effects (i.e., findings of differences between intervention groups vs. comparison groups) are negligible or nonexistent in the preliminary analyses reported; yet what is learned about doing intervention research may be both significant and generalizable.