Generating referrals to newly established programs: a cost effective comparison of two procedures

This study compares the relative effectiveness of two approaches to generating referrals to a newly established program for families with aggressive children. The approaches, an inservice with follow-up contact and an inservice without follow-up contact, were applied to two matched groups of schools. The results indicated that the inservice plus follow-up contact group referred 4 times as many families (significant p < .025 one-tailed). These results suggest that the inservice plus follow-up procedure was (1) more cost effective than the inservice procedure alone in generating referrals, (2) allowed a prescreening opportunity and (3) allowed an individualized public relations contact.