PROTOCOL: The Effects of School-based Social Information Processing Interventions on Aggressive Behavior

Social Information Processing

The programs to be included in the proposed systematic review all target one of more aspects of social information processing. Under this model, social behavior is the result of six interrelated steps: (1) encoding situational and internal cues, (2) interpretation of cues, (3) selecting or clarifying a goal, (4) generating or accessing possible responses, (5) choosing a response, (6) and behavioral enactment (Dodge; 1986; Crick & Dodge, 1994). Negative social behavior such as aggression is thought to be the result of cognitive deficits at one or more of these stages. ¹ For some children, the inability to process social information results in inappropriate behavioral responses and research has shown that aggressive children differ from non-aggressive children at various stages of social information processing (Dodge, Pettit, McClaskey, & Brown, 1986; Kendall, 1995). To illustrate, deficits at the encoding or interpretation stage of processing may involve misinterpreting as hostile the intent of others in neutral or ambiguous social situations. Hostile misattributions have been linked to aggressive responses (Crick & Dodge, 1994). And, aggressive children are more likely to make hostile attributions than their non-aggressive peers (Slaby & Guerra, 1988). Deficits at the goal selection or clarification stage can result in the selection of antisocial rather than prosocial goals (Asher & Renshaw, 1981; Crick & Dodge, 1989). Children who have difficulty accessing or evaluating responses to social situations (Steps 4 and 5) tend to have fewer responses from which to choose in social situations and may fail to evaluate the consequences of particular behaviors (e.g., Mize & Cox, 1990; Spivack & Shure, 1974).

To address this array of cognitive social information processing deficits, a variety of intervention strategies have been developed. Programs that target social information processing difficulties tend to be structured and have detailed lesson plans, which makes them attractive to schools. These programs are easily delivered by teachers or school psychologists and can be used in different formats (group or individual) and settings (classrooms or out-of-class school facilities).

Social Information Processing Programs

Some of the earliest programs designed to target social information processing were the social problem solving programs developed in the 1970s (e.g., D'Zurilla & Goldfried, 1971; Shure & Spivack, 1972; 1979). The programs were designed to improve social behavior by teaching cognitively-based problem solving skills. For example, the I Can Problem Solve program (Shure, 1992) involves teaching participants a series of problem solving skills that includes perspective taking, alternative response generation, consequential or means-ends thinking, and causal thinking.

Since the development of this program, many variations on this theme have been developed (Coleman, Wheeler, & Webber, 1993). Attribution retraining programs, such as Hudley's BrainPower (Hudley, 1991) program focus on the early stages of the social information processing model and teach children to detect intentionality accurately, to make nonhostile attributions when social encounters are ambiguous, and to generate appropriate behavioral responses to ambiguous negative situations. Lochman's Anger Coping Program (Lochman, Lampron, Burch, & Curry, 1985) includes a module that helps children learn cognitive goalsetting skills, a social problem solving component, and a module on anger control (which focuses on the emotional aspects of social information processing).

While these are examples of some typical social information processing programs, a conceptual definition or model of the programs in general is necessary for conducting the proposed systematic review. This model will aid in identifying candidate programs for the review and in coding the particular treatment components of each program. Social information processing programs have several distinct characteristics:

Programs involve training in one or more of the social information processing steps: (1) encoding situational and internal cues, (2) interpretation of cues, (3) selecting or clarifying a goal, (4) generating or accessing possible responses, (5) choosing a response, (6) and behavioral enactment.

What Social Information Processing Programs are Not

There is another set of popular programming strategies that also focus on social competence. These programs, often called by the generic term behavioral social skills, are distinct from the social information processing programs that are the focus of the proposed review. Behavioral social skills curricula focus primarily on the social (or antisocial) behaviors themselves, rather than the underlying cognitive thought processes. These programs generally teach specific skills such as making eye contact, smiling in context, paying compliments, communication skills, group entry skills, assertiveness, and the like (see Goldstein & Pentz, 1984 for a review).

In addition, there are many other cognitively-oriented programs that do not specifically target social information processing. For example, programs for children with attention or activity level difficulties often involve teaching skills for cognitive impulse control. Similarly, there are cognitively oriented programs for dealing with stress, divorce, depression, etc. (e.g., Alpert-Gillis, Pedro-Carroll, & Cowen, 1987; Lewinsohn, Clarke, Hops, & Andrews, 1990). While these other cognitive programs focus on generic thinking skills, they do not have the focus on interpersonal relationships that is characteristic of social information processing programs.

Prior Research on Social Skills Interventions

Several recent narrative reviews of social skills interventions are available (Clayton, Ballif-Spanvill, & Hunsaker, 2001; Howard, Flora, & Griffin, 1999; Moote, Smyth, & Wodarski, 1999; Nangle, Erdley, Carpenter, & Newman, 2002) but these cover social skills interventions more broadly by including training in social skills, friendship making skills, communication skills, and other such social behaviors without an explicit focus on altering cognitive and social information processing deficits. A few narrative reviews of programs specific to social information processing have also been conducted (e.g., Coleman, Wheeler, & Webber, 1993; Pellegrini & Urbain, 1985), but these are somewhat dated and include programs delivered to clinical populations in nonschool settings. Several meta-analysis of social skills interventions are available (e.g., Beelmann, Pfingsten, & Lösel, 1994; Denham & Almeida, 1987; Lösel & Beelmann, 2003; Quinn, Kavale, Mathur, Rutherford, & Forness, 1999; Schneider & Byrne, 1985). Like the narrative reviews, but with the exception of Denham and Almeida (1987), these syntheses focus on social competence programs in general and thus include both social information processing and behavioral social skills programs. The Denham and Almeida meta-analysis focuses exclusively on interpersonal cognitive problem solving interventions, but is 15 years old and does not include international studies.

Criteria for Including Studies in the Review

Interventions. The interventions must meet the three criteria that define social information processing programs. Although other treatment components may be included (e.g., behavioral social skills training, parenting skills training), the social information processing component must be the clear focus of the program. The definitional criteria are as follows:

Programs involve training in one or more of the social information processing steps: (1) encoding situational and internal cues, (2) interpretation of cues, (3) selecting or clarifying a goal, (4) generating or accessing possible responses, (5) choosing a response, (6) and behavioral enactment.

Settings and Subjects. The interventions must be delivered to school-aged children (K-12 or equivalent ages in international settings) in regular school settings during school hours. Special education classrooms and alternative schools are eligible school settings, although classrooms in residential facilities (e.g., psychiatric hospitals) are not. After-school programs are not eligible. Any qualifying school in any region or country is eligible.

Outcomes. The study must report intervention effects for at least one outcome variable, measured on children, representing aggressive behavior, broadly defined to include violence, aggression, fighting, person crimes, disruptive behavior problems, acting out, conduct disorder, externalizing problems, and so forth.

Study Design. Only studies using a control group design will be eligible. The intervention and control groups can be randomly or nonrandomly assigned but, if nonrandom, must be matched or provide evidence of initial equivalence on key demographic variables and/or pretests. Control groups can represent placebo, wait-list, no treatment, or “treatment as usual” conditions. Studies without control or comparison groups are not eligible. This includes one group pretest-posttest studies and studies in which a treatment group is compared to another treatment group.

Search Strategy for Identification of Studies

An attempt will be made to identify and retrieve the entire population of empirical studies that meet the eligibility criteria specified above, including both published and unpublished studies. Several sources will be used to identify potentially eligible research reports. First, a large database compiled at the Center for Evaluation Research and Methodology with NIMH grant funding will be searched for eligible interventions. This database includes studies of interventions targeting a wide range of risk factors for antisocial behavior and covers school-based interventions with aggressive behavior outcome variables.

In addition, a comprehensive search of bibliographic databases, including Psychological Abstracts, Dissertation Abstracts International, ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center), the Campbell and Cochrane Collaboration trials registers, U.S. Government Printing Office publications, National Criminal Justice Reference Service, and MedLine will serve as a source of information, especially for recent studies not included in the existing database.

The search strategy will utilize three classes of search terms ² derived from the controlled vocabulary used to index articles for each specific database. Wildcard characters will be used to identify variants of words (e.g., delinquen∗ to locate delinquent, delinquents, and delinquency). In each category, search terms are connected by the OR operator and the results for each category combined with the AND operator:

The population of interest: child, adolescent, childhood (MEDLINE); children, adolescents, preadolescents, students (ERIC); children, adolescents, students (PsychInfo), and children, adolescents, students (Sociological Abstracts);

Third, the bibliographies of previous meta-analyses and literature reviews (e.g., Denham & Almeida, 1987; Durlak, 1997) will be reviewed for studies that meet the eligibility criteria. In addition, the bibliographies of retrieved studies will themselves be examined for potentially eligible research reports. Finally, follow-up searches on the first and second authors of all eligible studies and cited reference searches of eligible articles in the Social Sciences Citation Index will be conducted. We have found this forward searching technique to be more efficient and fruitful than conducting hand searches of journal issues.

Over the past ten years of our meta-analytic work on the development and treatment of antisocial behavior, our search strategy has been created and honed with the assistance of trained research librarians. This multilayered strategy has enabled us to generate some the largest databases of research on antisocial behavior and its treatment and prevention that we are aware of. We are confident that these methods will identify nearly all of the relevant research on school-based social information processing programs.

Studies identified through our searches will be retrieved from the library, obtained via interlibrary loan, or requested directly from the author(s). In addition, the reviewers will attempt to locate and include any eligible studies published in non-English language sources that are missed by the search strategies described above. This will be done by contacting international colleagues within the Campbell Collaboration and some unaffiliated with it and asking for their assistance in locating eligible studies in their regions.

Based on the relevant studies in the meta-analytic database already compiled, it is estimated that at least 50 eligible studies will be located.

Selection of Studies

Abstracts or full text of the studies found through the search procedures will be screened by one of the reviewers or a trained research assistant. Potentially eligible studies will be retrieved from Vanderbilt University Libraries, Interlibrary Loan, ERIC, University Microfilms, and government documents sources and final determination of eligibility will be made from the full document. For documents already retrieved for the larger study of early intervention programs, eligibility determination will be made from the full document.

Although recent research suggests that two reviewers might increase accuracy in identifying potentially eligible studies from abstracts obtained through bibliographic searches (Edwards, et al., 2002), we believe that this added expense is not indicated in our case. Our experience with abstract reviewing has led us to conclude that eligibility decisions cannot be reliably made at this level. There is simply not enough detail in most abstracts to allow reviewers to judge whether a study meets design requirements or program specifications. Thus, we review abstracts mainly for relevance. Final eligibility screening is based on the entire article. For example, at the abstract screening level, we would typically mark as irrelevant studies that clearly apply to an ineligible subject population (e.g., adults, institutionalized juveniles) or those that are clearly prediction-oriented (i.e., there is no intervention). But, we would retrieve any report that mentioned a program, even if it did not mention social information processing.

Assessment of Methodological Quality

A range of characteristics related to methodological quality will be coded for each of the eligible studies. These characteristics include unit and method of assignment to experimental groups, analysis of pretreatment differences/similarities between groups, attrition from each group, and characteristics of the dependent measures including reporter, social desirability bias, treatment-test overlap, and the like (see the draft coding scheme attached as Appendix A). These characteristics will be carried over into analysis of program effects. Methodological variables that have important relationships with effect size will be statistically controlled or (if that is not possible) used to identify studies to be excluded from the synthesis.

Data Management and Extraction

The coding protocol that has been developed for the larger meta-analysis described earlier will be adapted for this synthesis (Appendix A). The standardized mean difference effect size statistic (Cohen, 1988; Lipsey & Wilson, 2001) will be used to represent the intervention effects reported in the eligible studies. This effect size statistic is defined as the difference between the treatment and control group means on an outcome variable divided by their pooled standard deviations. When means and standard deviations are not available, the effect sizes will be estimated, if possible, from the statistics that are reported using the procedures in Lipsey and Wilson (2001). Typically, studies report results on multiple outcome constructs (e.g., aggression, social skills, school achievement) and often include more than one operationalization of the same construct (e.g., parent and teacher reports of aggressive behavior). All effect sizes that can be extracted from a study will be coded. Procedures for maintaining statistical independence during analysis in cases where multiple effect sizes are available will be discussed in the next section.

In addition to effect size values, information will be coded for each study that describes the methods and procedures, the intervention, and the subject samples (see Appendix A). The items describing study methods and procedure include details of the design, measures, and attrition. Those coded to describe the subject samples include age, gender, ethnicity, prior antisocial behavior, and risk for later antisocial behavior. The intervention will be described by coding the details of specific program components; duration, intensity, setting, and format of the program; delivery personnel; and, other such characteristics.

All study coding will be done on computer screens configured in FileMaker Pro^® for direct entry into the database. Samples of the computer screens are presented in Appendix B.

Statistical Procedures

Standardized mean difference effect sizes will be computed and analyzed for each outcome construct of interest. For any such construct, e.g., aggressive behavior, social skills, only one effect size per study will be included in the analysis. When selecting a set of statistically independent effect sizes for analysis, meta-analysts typically have two choices: they can average the effect sizes that represent different operationalizations of the same construct or they can choose one effect size based on some preestablished rule. In our work on the larger database that serves as the starting point for the proposed review, we have found that the characteristics of the dependent variables have important influences on effect size (Wilson & Lipsey, 2003). For example, whether the dependent variables in a primary study are reported by parents or self reported influences the results of that study. Simply averaging multiple effect sizes with these different characteristics results in a loss of this important information. Therefore, we plan to select one effect size from each set of overlapping effect sizes based on the following rules:

We identify the most frequent reporter source (self-report, parent, etc.) and select the effect size from the most frequent reporter.

The analysis will be designed to produce descriptive information on the characteristics of the studies included, the mean effect size for each major outcome construct, the heterogeneity of effect sizes around those means, and the relationships between effect size and the method, subject, and intervention characteristics of the studies. It is at the analysis stage that the nuances of effective programs can be teased out. For example, the effects of stand-alone social information processing programs can be compared with the effects of combination programs. or, programs that target specific information processing steps (like attribution retraining), can be compared with the more broadly oriented programs (like social problem solving). SPSS and a set of SPSS macros developed by David Wilson (Lipsey & Wilson, 2001) will be used to conduct the analyses using random effects models.