Parenting Interventions for Families with Refugee Background (PIRM)

The PIRM study is randomized controlled trial (RCT) design to evaluate the Incredible Years (IY) Parenting program and Measurement Feedback Systems (MFS) for use with refugee families. Though IY is a well-developed program that helps to support parenting among families with children aged 6 to 12 years, insufficient research has been done with IY regarding its effectiveness with refugee parents. Similarly, MFS are used to support mental health service delivery by providing timely feedback to mental health workers about the effectiveness of their efforts. MFS, though fairly well adopted in first and second line services, are not well evaluated. The PIRM studywill give a good indication about the efficacy of these interventions and do so in a cost-effective manner. The primary aims of the present study are to evaluate the effectiveness of the IY Parenting intervention for improving primary outcome measures of parenting skills, lowering parental stress, and reducing problem behavior in children. The IY Parenting program is expected have better primary outcomes than, the treatment as usual (TAU) control group. Furthermore, the present study is an evaluation of the effectiveness of systematic, measurement feedback to improve treatment outcomes for refugee parents, therefore, we expect better outcomes for families whose group leaders are receiving systematic feedback about their group’s progress.

The study will focus on refugee parents with children between the ages of 6 and 12 who have recently settled in a Norwegian municipality. The IY portion of the study is an RCT which will compare IY with TAU. The MFS portion of the study will randomize half of the IY arm of the study to MFS, and the other half to no-MFS. IY group leaders will be recruited from local refugee and municipal services.

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