The Ministries of Education, Health and Social Development, in collaboration with academic experts, established the Incredible Years Pilot Study to assess the efficacy of the Incredible Years Parent programme in New Zealand.The findings of the evaluation will inform the further development of existing IYP programmes and guide decisions about the investment of significant funding for rolling it out on a population basis in New Zealand.
The findings suggest that the programme can be successfully implemented in New Zealand and retain its general level of effectiveness. The study produced clear evidence of child and parent behaviour change in the majority of the participant families, and this improvement was maintained through to a six-month follow-up.
The benefits of the training were broadly similar for Māori and non-Māori families, and both Māori and non-Māori parents expressed generally high to moderate satisfaction with the programme on most measures. This project also includes a follow-up report made in 2014
Key Results
- There was clear evidence of child behaviour change, with effect sizes as expected on the basis of the international literature. Effect size, as measured by Cohen’s d, provides an indication of the extent of reported change, whereby an effect size of d=.20 is considered small, an effect size of d=.50 is medium and an effect size of d=.80 is large.
- There was clear evidence of parenting behaviour change, with effect sizes as expected on the basis of the international literature.
- The benefits of the IYP training were broadly similar for Māori and non-Māori families. Nevertheless the evidence suggests the need for further work on maximising gains for Māori families, particularly in the maintenance of behaviour change.
- Both Māori and non-Māori parents expressed high to moderate satisfaction with the programme.
- These results suggest the IYP programme can be successfully implemented in New Zealand and retain its general level of effectiveness.
- The findings provide a series of performance benchmarks against which the future roll out of the IYP programme in New Zealand can be assessed.