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Can a Parenting Intervention to Prevent Early Conduct Problems Interrupt Girls’ Risk for Intimate Partner Violence 10 Years Later?

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Abstract

This study tests whether a parenting intervention for families of preschoolers at risk for conduct problems can prevent later risk for intimate partner violence (IPV). Ninety-nine preschoolers at familial risk for conduct problems were randomly assigned to intervention or control conditions. Ten years later, 45 preschoolers and 43 of their siblings completed an assessment of their romantic relationships, including measures of physical and psychological IPV. The study focuses on the 54 females, including targets (n = 27) and siblings (n = 27) who participated in a 10-year follow-up (M age = 16.5, SD = 5.2, range = 10–28). Using an intent-to-treat (ITT) design, multivariate regressions suggest that females from families randomly assigned to intervention in early childhood scored lower than those in the control condition on perceptions of dating violence as normative, beliefs about IPV prevalence, exposure to IPV in their own peer group, and expected sanction behaviors for IPV perpetration and victimization. Findings suggest that early parenting intervention may reduce association of high-risk females with aggressive peers and partners in adolescence.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, NY, USA

    Miriam K. Ehrensaft, Heather Knous Westfall & Thailyn Lopez

  2. Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Duke University Medical Center, Box 3454, Durham, NC, 27710, USA

    Miriam K. Ehrensaft

  3. Institutional Research, Renton College, Renton, WA, USA

    Heather Knous Westfall

  4. National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control, New York, NY, USA

    Phyllis Holditch Niolon

  5. Department of Population Health, New York University School of Medicine, New York, NY, USA

    Dimitra Kamboukos, Keng-Yen Huang & Laurie Miller Brotman

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  1. Miriam K. Ehrensaft
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  2. Heather Knous Westfall
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  3. Phyllis Holditch Niolon
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  4. Thailyn Lopez
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  5. Dimitra Kamboukos
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  6. Keng-Yen Huang
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  7. Laurie Miller Brotman
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Correspondence to Miriam K. Ehrensaft.

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Funding

This grant was supported by funding from the Centers for Disease Control (5 U49 CE001247, 2007–2012, to M. Ehrensaft) and the National Institute of Mental Health (R01 MH055188, 1997–2007, to L. Brotman).

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Ethical Approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Ehrensaft, M.K., Westfall, H.K., Niolon, P.H. et al. Can a Parenting Intervention to Prevent Early Conduct Problems Interrupt Girls’ Risk for Intimate Partner Violence 10 Years Later?. Prev Sci 19, 449–458 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11121-017-0831-z

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