Principal Investigator: Cynthia Hudley
Level of Intervention: Indicated
Target Population: Aggressive 10-12 year old African-American boys
References: Hudley & Graham (1993, 1995)
Theory (Risk & Protective Factors Targeted):
Childhood aggression is very stable over time and predicts a number
of poor adolescent outcomes. Many of the social and economic correlates
of childhood aggression are more prevalent among ethnic minorities.
The authors developed their prevention program for aggressive
youth based on an attribution theory of aggression, whereby the
cognitive inability to appropriately interpret the intent of others
actions may promote reactive aggression. The authors were also
interested in the role of emotion in attribution theory and anger
as a critical link between social cognition and aggression.
Description of Intervention:
Attributional Intervention:
12-lesson social-cognitive school based intervention was designed
to teach aggressive students not to infer hostile peer intent
in negative social interactions of ambiguous social origin through
role play, story reading, and discussion of personal experiences.
The intervention consisted of three components. The first focused
on helping the boys accurately detect intentionality in social
situations. The second was designed to increase the boys
use of non-hostile attributions when interpreting the intent of
others. The third focused on teaching the students appropriate
responses to ambiguously caused negative outcomes. The program
sessions were held twice-weekly for 6 weeks, in locations away
from the regular classroom. A typical session lasted 40-60 minutes.
Each group consisted of 6 students, four aggressive students and
two non-aggressive students.
Attention Training:
The attention training condition consisted of a 12-session, nonsocial
problem solving program based on the Building Thinking Skills
program (Black & Black, 1984). The instructional format was
similar to the attributional intervention.
Research Subjects:
Subjects were 120 poor (30% received reduced or free lunch), African
American boys (from two schools in Los Angeles). From this pool,
78 boys were classified as aggressive and 42 were classified as
non-aggressive. Aggressive students were identified with teacher
ratings and peer sociometric nominations (positive, negative,
aggressive behavior, prosocial behavior). To be aggressive, subjects
had to have > median on the aggression subscale of the Teacher
Checklist (Coie, 1990; Coie & Dodge, 1988), social preference
scores < 0, and have at least twice as many aggressive as prosocial
peer nominations. To be non-aggressive, subjects had to be at
or below the median on the aggressive subscale of the Teacher
Checklist, have a social preference score greater than 0, and
have received at least twice as many prosocial as aggressive nominations.
Research Design:
Subjects (72 aggressive and 36 non-aggressive) were randomly assigned
to one of three groups: treatment, attention training, or no-treatment
control. Intervention and attention-training groups were divided
into groups with four aggressive subjects and two non-aggressive
subjects in each. The control group also contained aggressive
and non-aggressive subjects.
Outcomes:
After subject attrition the final sample consisted of 66 boys.
Post-test:
At post-test, the aggressive boys in the intervention group were
rated as significantly less aggressive by teachers (p<.05)
compared to the attention training or control groups. This treatment
effect was also evident on specific items of the teacher ratings
related to reactive aggression (p<.05).
Aggressive subjects judgements of intent, feelings of anger, and behavioral tendencies were assessed in four different types of hypothetical peer provocation situations (i.e. prosocial, accidental, ambiguous, and hostile). The overall intervention effect was significant (p<.001) and these effects were evident on all three variables, but only in ambiguous scenarios. Treatment group membership accounted for 33% of the multivariate variance. Boys who participated in the attributional program perceived significantly less hostile intent (p<.001), reported significantly less anger (p<.001), and endorsed less hostile behavior (p<.05) compared to the other two groups. There were no significant group differences in disciplinary office referrals (of any type).
In an analog task designed to assess subjects responses in actual peer interactions, aggressive boys who had participated in the intervention were significantly less likely to infer hostile intent (p<.001) compared to the other groups. Verbalizations during the task were coded and boys in the experimental condition received significantly higher scores (p<.01) than the other two groups. Higher scores indicated more neutral verbal behavior as opposed to aggressive verbal behavior.
Strengths & Limitations:
The Attributional Intervention Program targeted specific social-cognitive
risk factors associated with childhood aggression by providing
an intervention at the individual child level. In a randomized
trial, support was found for the effectiveness of the program
in altering the types of attributions and the emotional responses
that the participants provided in ambiguous situations. At post-test,
subjects were also rated as less aggressive by teachers and observed
as less hostile in an actual ambiguous social interaction. These
findings are promising given the quality of the evaluation design,
the use of multiple sources of information including behavioral
observations, and the fact that the teachers who provided student
assessments were unaware of the childs status.
A strength of the evaluation was that the authors addressed the issues of dosage, staff training, and program fidelity. All students were required to attend a minimum of 10 sessions and all subjects met this requirement. Group leaders were two African-American women with backgrounds in education. The instructors participated in 16 hours of training with the curriculum developer and conducted 3 experimental and 3 attention-training groups each. Weekly supervision was provided to the group leaders to monitor and discuss implementation integrity. It is important to consider however, that the sample size was relatively small, the subjects were all male, and the majority of the participants were African-American, which limit the generalizability of the findings. In addition, the absence of follow-up data leaves in question the long-term impact of the program.
The author compared the aggressive and non-aggressive subjects to determine the clinical significance of the study findings. Although aggressive boys in the intervention were rated by teachers as less aggressive after participating in the attributional program, they were still rated as significantly more aggressive than the non-aggressive subjects at post-test.