The Added Value of Parents Practicing in Virtual Reality to Illustrate the Use of Innovative Methods in Parent-Child...

Throughout years of research, the well-known behavioral parent training program, Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT), has been adapted and enhanced to tailor the treatment to the needs of families in community-based clinical care. This study wished to evaluate an add-on to PCIT that could be engaging for parents. As a way to enlarge practice opportunity and potentially allow parents to achieve positive treatment effects sooner, this study added virtual reality (VR) to PCIT.

This study aimed to increase positive parenting skills at a faster pace with the use of PCIT-VR, on the basis that practicing positive parenting skills in the VR tool would increase parents' overall practice time, thus leading to more confidence in their skills, which could consequently increase the pace of skill acquisition. Furthermore, we hypothesized that due to the overall increase in positive parenting skills, PCIT treatment effects such as diminishment of child disruptive behavior and parenting stress would decrease at a faster pace when VR was introduced.

Families were recruited from a specialized child and adolescent psychiatry clinical practice in the Netherlands. Using a single-case experimental design, 11 families, equating to 18 participants, signed informed consent forms and received the staggered introduction of VR to treatment. As is common with a single-case experimental design, visual inspection analyses and randomization tests were conducted. Group differences were evaluated with nonparametric tests and reliable change indices.

Overall, our study reaffirmed that PCIT is an effective intervention for this population as there were positive treatment effects found in almost all cases. Nevertheless, there did not seem to be a clear relationship between the use of the VR tool and PCIT treatment effects, although positive parenting skills seemed to increase when VR was introduced to treatment for some parents. For all parents, questions and comments decreased with the introduction of VR. These findings tentatively suggest that practicing with VR could potentially increase positive parenting skills and also have an impact on other treatment-related outcomes, such as child disruptive behavior and parenting stress.

This was the first time that PCIT has been supplemented with VR. We provide preliminary evidence of its added value. We cautiously suggest that VR could provide added value to PCIT and increase confidence in parenting skills for certain parents, although there are complex factors that play into treatment success that must simultaneously be considered. These factors include parents having the motivation and mental capacity to change and the complex psychological problems some families face. Although promising, we believe that due to the novelty of our VR practice tool and the variety of results from our study, more research is necessary into PCIT-VR to draw further conclusions on its effects.