Efficacy of Prevention Services for Families
Parent training and community-based prevention services provide a mechanism by which speech language clinicians help families better understand the language needs of their children, and when necessary, these services can also help families get the services their children need.
Over the past five years we have been studying this question by examining data from a program titled Tips About Talk. The goal of Tips is to help parents, teachers, and childcare providers learn about typical and atypical behaviors in childhood language development, play, and reading. The program also teaches parents, teachers, and childcare providers techniques they can use to facilitate children’s development of language.
Within the lab, we also conduct research that is layered on top of these clinical services. Some of the questions we are interested in answering are:
- Do general education prevention services lead to positive changes in children, families and communities?
- Can services be improved by altering the materials, format, and/or intensity of the Program?
- Do services need to be customized to the particular characteristics of an audience or are there common features of parenting and child care that apply to all audiences.
