Clinician Intentions to use the Components of Parent Coaching Within Community Early Intervention Systems

Parent coaching is a complex, psychosocial intervention with multiple core components. Clinicians' use of these core components may be influenced by distinct factors; no research has examined whether clinician perceptions of parent coaching vary across core coaching components. This study aimed to examine the extent to which clinicians working with families of young autistic children in publicly funded early intervention intend to use core parent coaching components, and to examine how closely psychological factors relate to providers' intentions to use each component.

Using the Theory of Planned Behavior as a framework, this study compared the strength of clinicians' intentions across five core parent coaching components: collaboration with parents, delivering the intervention within daily routines, demonstrating the intervention, providing in-vivo feedback, and reflection and problem solving. We examined the associations between intentions and psychological determinants of intentions (i.e., attitudes, norms, and self-efficacy) for each component.

Clinicians' average intentions varied by core component, with strongest intentions for demonstrating the intervention strategy for a parent. The associations between intentions and psychological determinants also varied by core component. Attitudes, injunctive norms, and self-efficacy, but not descriptive norms, significantly related to clinicians' intentions to use collaboration and daily routines, whereas attitudes and descriptive norms, but not injunctive norms and self-efficacy, significantly related to clinicians' intentions to use feedback and reflection and problem solving.

These results suggest that implementation strategies should be tailored to the specific intervention component to be most efficient and effective. The results also provide examples of potentially malleable factors that implementation strategies can strategically target.