The Coping Power Program grew out of an earlier empirically-supported program, the Anger Coping Program. The Anger Coping Program was also school-based, and produced lower levels of substance use than a control group at a three-year follow-up. However, this program only had a component for children, and some of the children’s other behavioral gains had ebbed by the time of follow-up. The Coping Power Program was developed to take advantage of the encouraging preventive effects of the Anger Coping Program, by expanding on the child-focused intervention and adding a behavioral parent-training component.
John E. Lochman is a Professor and Saxon Chairholder in Clinical Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, and an Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Duke University Medical Center.
Dr. Lochman received his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Connecticut in 1977. He has authored more than 150 scientific articles, chapters and books, and this work has primarily focused on the causes and consequences of highly aggressive behavior in childhood. In addition to his prevention research on the Coping Power program, Dr. Lochman also is a co-principal investigator on a study of the preventive effects of the comprehensive, intensive Fast Track program, designed to prevent adolescent conduct problems, funded by National Institute of Health (NIMH). Dr. Lochman serves on grant review committees at NIMH and at several private foundations. He is on the editorial boards for the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology and the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, and an associate editor for Behavior Therapy.
The co-developer of the Coping Power program is Karen Wells, who is a Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University, where she also serves as the Director of the Family Studies program and the Director of the Clinical Psychology Internship Program. Dr. Wells received her doctoral degree in Clinical Psychology at the University of Georgia. She has published widely on the effects of behavioral parent training programs with behavior problem children, and is a co-investigator on a NIMH-funded clinical trial of treatments for Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
Five ongoing intervention research studies on the Coping Power program have been funded by various federal agencies, including: the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP), the National Institute for Drug Abuse (NIDA), the US Department of Justice (DOJ), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The CSAP study randomly assigned aggressive children to one of four conditions: Coping Power plus a universal intervention, Coping Power alone, the universal intervention alone, or a control condition.
In the first NIDA study, aggressive boys were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: the full Coping Power Program with child and parent components, the Coping Power child component only, or a control condition. All of the high risk children in the NIDA study will be compared to a non-risk group of boys, to determine if the interventions bring the risk children into a normal range.
In a second NIDA study, school counselors are being trained to implement the Coping Power Program. This dissemination field trial is examining the role of training on implementation and sustained use of the Coping Power Program by school counselors.
In the DOJ and CDC studies, the effects of an abbreviated Coping Power Program are being evaluated in a new community by randomly assigning aggressive children to either the Coping Power program or to a control condition. After the intervention year in the DOJ and CDC studies, intervention children are randomly assigned to receive a year-long booster intervention or not, to determine if a booster intervention can effectively maintain the program’s positive effects.
Results indicate that the Coping Power Program is effective in reducing children’s aggressive behavior and preventing their substance use. Specific findings include:
- Reduced substance use at end of intervention and at one-year follow-up
- Reduced delinquent behavior at one-year follow-up
- Reductions in aggressive behavior at home and at school by end of intervention
- Improved social competence
Outcomes
The Coping Power program is being evaluated in four grant-funded intervention research studies, and has been translated and disseminated in clinical trials in the Netherlands, and in a residential school for deaf children. Follow-up studies of children originally involved in the Coping Power intervention are ongoing and at this time only post intervention and one-year follow-up effects have been examined.
These data show that the Coping Power program has produced significant preventive effects in children’s substance use and a number of improvements in the predictor variables presumed to mediate substance use. By the end of intervention, even though relatively few sixth graders were using substances overall, the Coping Power program had led children to have significantly lower levels of substance use (an overall score of tobacco, alcohol and marijuana use) than did control children (6% of Coping Power children versus 17% of control children).
Teachers rated the Coping Power intervention children as having improvements in social skills, intervention children perceived that their social competence had improved, and intervention children tended to have less aggressive beliefs and were less angered by social problems. Teachers also rated the intervention children as having improved behavior, and both teachers and parents rated the intervention children as having lower levels of proactive aggression by post-intervention.
Intervention effects on school bonding were more limited, although intervention children tended to perceive they were more academically competent. Intervention parents had become more supportively involved with their children. On several of these outcomes, the children who had received both the Indicated Coping Power program, targeted at high-risk children, and the Universal intervention, had the best post-intervention results, indicating the efficacy of nesting targeted interventions for high risk children within Universal interventions.