Flexibility in the Protocol Posted on March 1, 2006 Joe Price (bio) describes how group facilitators learned to personalize the intervention to meet the immediate needs of the participants.

We're also flexible in the sense that within the groups we had the group facilitators would go in with three or four things they needed to get across that day, but they weren't doing it in a kind of didactic fashion, coming in and saying that here is the lecture we'll deliver. They integrated it within the group discussion so that the discussion might start out about a social worker or about a kid but then the facilitator then tried to integrate that material within those discussions and particularly around the problems they were having with their kids. We really wanted to adapt the curriculum to what was going on in the homes in doing that.

That's a tough piece. That's probably what we struggled with the most was helping the group facilitators be able to integrate the curriculum and individualize it to that particular home and that particular kid, so there are some basic principles we wanted to get across, but there was flexibility in how we talk about it, where we talk about it. Our first six sessions were kind of laying down the foundation, and that sequence was important, but after that, we had flexibility in when the sessions were going to come in.

For instance, if it was starting at the beginning of the year, we have a session on school success. Well, it was up to the group facilitator where that was going to come. Maybe it was going to come in session 7 and not 13 just because the kids are starting school and that made more sense to do that, or a session on stress and management needed to come in earlier because there were a couple of parents who were really having some stressful life experiences.

We also had flexibility in the curriculum in that we had two free sessions, and that was in case like we had one time, a woman came in and her mother had died, and the group spent the majority of the time helping her to process that. I remember the group facilitator came back, and said, 'Joe, we didn't get much done this week,' and I said that was fine; that's why we have extra sessions. She needed that support, and that was an important part of our model too. We had the parent management training, but the support piece was also very important. We wanted to make sure to have that kind of interaction and support, and the only way that could happen is with flexibility and adaptability.

Particularly if you're trying to get any kind of group support going on, you can't come in and manage that; you can't come in and dictate that. That has to be ongoing, and so what's really key is finding people who understand the model, who understand the principles, but then can integrate it in a group setting that fosters group support. That was key for us, and I think that in terms of interventions, is key.

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