Turns out that some parents do require a mandatory license for parenting. A parent can end up before judge and be required to take a parenting course. These courses are all (as far as I can tell) evidence-based, developed and evaluated using sound science. Programs like: Incredible Years, Triple P, Kazdin Method.
Ironically, most parents, even those who read lots of parenting books, never encounter a parenting book that is primarily evidence-based. Most parenting books are opinion-based. The most recent evidence-based book that I know of is “Everyday Parenting” by Kazdin.
Well, I gave some specific references (Incredible Years, Triple P, Kazdin Method, Everyday Parenting by Kazdin). Have you checked them out?
Kazdin runs the Child Conduct Center at Yale and former president of the American Psychological Society. Incredible Years is a program developed at U of Washington.
What does it take to turn off your BS detector? I speculate that I can provide it.
There is also the Parent Management Oregon Model (PTMO) that originates with Patterson at U of Oregon. Patterson wrote the first evidence-based parenting book for a general audience (first that I know of) in 1977 called Living with Children. And, when he wrote it, some of the science was already 15 years old. That gets us back to 1962, which means you have 50 years of catching up to do. With any luck, I can set off your Future Shock detector.
In 1962, Montrose Wolf at U of Washington oversaw a series of interventions that showed that a care giver could reduce or increase specific child behaviors by 40-fold in 2 weeks. The method pretty much amounted to the caregiver cranking their neck in response to the kid’s behavior, redirecting their attention in other words.
What does it take to turn off your BS detector? I speculate that I can provide it.
With respect to parenting? A fair amount, I’d say.
If we are going to be talking about “sound science”, first I’d like to see relevant non-subjective quantifiable metrics which are reasonably stable across environments (e.g. cultural) and individuals. Then I would expect a description of the major mechanisms underlying behavior which should be pretty universal and reliably identifiable. And finally I’d want an ability to make forecasts, say what will happen in cases both with specific interventions and without.
Given that I don’t think psychology as a whole qualifies as “sound science”, I don’t really see how parenting advice can pull it off.
I agree about psychology as a whole. How about the practical part of behaviorism, operant conditoning?
It’s quantifiable and reasonably good at forecasts.
Surely you realize that stability across individuals if not really to be expected overall in detail. People don’t always react the same in detail because of genetic difference (as an example). Stabilty is likely not evidenced for the most extremely genetically different individuals, and it is not to be expected. Environment and culture can lead to variations as well. Stability is not to be expected in general, you just need to explain variation.
Operant conditioning is the foundation. In parenting, add to that the discovery that adult attention is a powerful positive reinforcer for most children. The methodological advances in parenting are largely built on that foundation.
Actually if it works as well as I claim, psychotherapy for kids might be less effective. It involves changing the kid’s environment. Psychotherapy can’t do that. You have to get the parents to be willing to change and give them training.
On the contrary, the fact that psychotherapy works at all is evidence that the operant conditioning methods I am pushing are not the whole story, and of course operant conditioning is not the whole story.
By your definition, medicine is not a sound science because stability overall in detail is not to be expected due to genetic variability.
So, you’ve thrown in a link to a paper which you clearly didn’t even glance at because it has nothing to do with performing reproducible measurements.
Here is the abstract for you:
“The previous articles in this special section make the case for the importance of evaluating the
clinical significance of therapeutic change, present key measures and innovative ways in which
they are applied, and more generally provide important guidelines for evaluating therapeutic
change. Fundamental issues raised by the concept of clinical significance and the methods
discussed in the previous articles serve as the basis of the present comments. Salient among
these issues are ambiguities regarding the meaning of current measures of clinical significance,
the importance of relating assessment of clinical significance to the goals of therapy, and
evaluation of the construct(s) that clinical significance reflects. Research directions that are
discussed include developing a typology of therapy goals, evaluating cutoff scores and
thresholds for clinical significance, and attending to social as well as clinical impact of treatment.”
Do note the part that mentions ambiguities regarding the meaning of current measures.
I did skim it and it adresses all the relevant aspects. It is indeed the first hit that came up but it does show a very rigorous and scientific treatment of the topic. It is also balanced in so far as it separated out statistical measures from other valuations (to a avoid calling it “bayesian priors” which he does’t claim):
Apart from reliability of change or group differences (e.g., statistical
significance) and the magnitude of experimental effects (e.g., effect size or correlation), the importance of the
change and the impact on client functioning add critical dimensions. Treatments that produce reliable effects
may be quite different in their impact on client functioning, and clinical significance brings this issue to light.
It tells me that Kazdin knows quite well “how to perform reproducible measurements”, not how these measurements are carried out in particular. It seems that there are more papers out there that actually do this.
Turns out that some parents do require a mandatory license for parenting. A parent can end up before judge and be required to take a parenting course. These courses are all (as far as I can tell) evidence-based, developed and evaluated using sound science. Programs like: Incredible Years, Triple P, Kazdin Method.
Ironically, most parents, even those who read lots of parenting books, never encounter a parenting book that is primarily evidence-based. Most parenting books are opinion-based. The most recent evidence-based book that I know of is “Everyday Parenting” by Kazdin.
I would like to point out that my BS detector started jerking rather alarmingly at those words...
Well, I gave some specific references (Incredible Years, Triple P, Kazdin Method, Everyday Parenting by Kazdin). Have you checked them out?
Kazdin runs the Child Conduct Center at Yale and former president of the American Psychological Society. Incredible Years is a program developed at U of Washington.
What does it take to turn off your BS detector? I speculate that I can provide it.
There is also the Parent Management Oregon Model (PTMO) that originates with Patterson at U of Oregon. Patterson wrote the first evidence-based parenting book for a general audience (first that I know of) in 1977 called Living with Children. And, when he wrote it, some of the science was already 15 years old. That gets us back to 1962, which means you have 50 years of catching up to do. With any luck, I can set off your Future Shock detector.
In 1962, Montrose Wolf at U of Washington oversaw a series of interventions that showed that a care giver could reduce or increase specific child behaviors by 40-fold in 2 weeks. The method pretty much amounted to the caregiver cranking their neck in response to the kid’s behavior, redirecting their attention in other words.
With respect to parenting? A fair amount, I’d say.
If we are going to be talking about “sound science”, first I’d like to see relevant non-subjective quantifiable metrics which are reasonably stable across environments (e.g. cultural) and individuals. Then I would expect a description of the major mechanisms underlying behavior which should be pretty universal and reliably identifiable. And finally I’d want an ability to make forecasts, say what will happen in cases both with specific interventions and without.
Given that I don’t think psychology as a whole qualifies as “sound science”, I don’t really see how parenting advice can pull it off.
Why? It is possible and reasonable for a specific set of metrics to be (explicitly) specific to a single ‘culture’.
Why?
I agree about psychology as a whole. How about the practical part of behaviorism, operant conditoning?
It’s quantifiable and reasonably good at forecasts.
Surely you realize that stability across individuals if not really to be expected overall in detail. People don’t always react the same in detail because of genetic difference (as an example). Stabilty is likely not evidenced for the most extremely genetically different individuals, and it is not to be expected. Environment and culture can lead to variations as well. Stability is not to be expected in general, you just need to explain variation.
Operant conditioning is the foundation. In parenting, add to that the discovery that adult attention is a powerful positive reinforcer for most children. The methodological advances in parenting are largely built on that foundation.
It looks much more like engineering than like science to me. I don’t know it enough to have an opinion on how well it works.
Of course and that’s one of the reasons for me having doubts about the “sound science” label.
Post factum..? :-)
In any case, if it all worked as well as you claim, surely psychotherapy for kids would be very effective. I suspect this is not the case in reality.
Actually if it works as well as I claim, psychotherapy for kids might be less effective. It involves changing the kid’s environment. Psychotherapy can’t do that. You have to get the parents to be willing to change and give them training.
On the contrary, the fact that psychotherapy works at all is evidence that the operant conditioning methods I am pushing are not the whole story, and of course operant conditioning is not the whole story.
By your definition, medicine is not a sound science because stability overall in detail is not to be expected due to genetic variability.
It is not.
Notice how only recently the idea of “evidence-based medicine” appeared and how much pushback there was (and is) against that idea.
Seems Kazdin knows quite well how to perform reproducible measurements e.g. http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/HomePage/Class/Psy394Q/Research%20Design%20Class/Assigned%20Readings/Clinical%20Trials/Kazdin99.pdf
So, you’ve thrown in a link to a paper which you clearly didn’t even glance at because it has nothing to do with performing reproducible measurements.
Here is the abstract for you:
“The previous articles in this special section make the case for the importance of evaluating the clinical significance of therapeutic change, present key measures and innovative ways in which they are applied, and more generally provide important guidelines for evaluating therapeutic change. Fundamental issues raised by the concept of clinical significance and the methods discussed in the previous articles serve as the basis of the present comments. Salient among these issues are ambiguities regarding the meaning of current measures of clinical significance, the importance of relating assessment of clinical significance to the goals of therapy, and evaluation of the construct(s) that clinical significance reflects. Research directions that are discussed include developing a typology of therapy goals, evaluating cutoff scores and thresholds for clinical significance, and attending to social as well as clinical impact of treatment.”
Do note the part that mentions ambiguities regarding the meaning of current measures.
I did skim it and it adresses all the relevant aspects. It is indeed the first hit that came up but it does show a very rigorous and scientific treatment of the topic. It is also balanced in so far as it separated out statistical measures from other valuations (to a avoid calling it “bayesian priors” which he does’t claim):
So, do show where does this particular paper tell you how to, in your words, “perform reproducible measurements”.
Your quote talks about interpretation of measurements—it says nothing about how to make sure the measurement itself is reliable and reproducible.
It tells me that Kazdin knows quite well “how to perform reproducible measurements”, not how these measurements are carried out in particular. It seems that there are more papers out there that actually do this.