Family Outcomes of a Community-Based Trial of Project ImPACT

Area of Science:

• Developmental Psychology
• Early Intervention Services
• Behavioral Interventions

Background:

• Caregiver-mediated interventions are crucial for supporting families with young children exhibiting social communication challenges.
• Project ImPACT (PI) is a naturalistic developmental behavioral intervention designed for caregiver implementation.
• Public early intervention (EI) programs offer a scalable platform for delivering such interventions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the effectiveness of Project ImPACT (PI) when implemented by community early intervention (EI) providers.
• To assess the impact of PI on provider coaching, caregiver-child interactions, parenting stress, and self-efficacy.
• To examine child social communication outcomes in response to PI.

Main Methods:

• A randomized waitlist-control community trial was conducted across California EI programs.
• Participants included 47 EI providers and 125 caregiver-child dyads (ages 14-32 months).
• Multilevel models analyzed changes in coaching, interactions, strategy use, stress, self-efficacy, and child communication over four months.

Main Results:

• Provider training in PI significantly improved evidence-based coaching quality.
• Caregivers using PI demonstrated enhanced parent-child interaction domains.
• No significant differences were found in PI fidelity, caregiver stress, or self-efficacy between groups.
• Child communication outcomes improved over time in both services-as-usual and PI groups, without significant between-group differences.

Conclusions:

• Training community EI providers in Project ImPACT (PI) is feasible and scalable, improving coaching and caregiver-child interactions.
• While PI shows promise in community settings, differential child-level effects were not detected within the study period.
• Larger sample sizes and longer follow-up durations are necessary to detect potential long-term child communication benefits.