Leveraging Motivational Interviewing to Coach Teachers in the Implementation of Preventive Evidence-Based Practices: A Sequential Analysis of the Motivational Interviewing Process

Operationalizing In-session Treatment Engagement Strategies and Behaviors for Adolescents With ADHD and Their Parents

OBJECTIVE

Many treatment engagement challenges are documented for adolescents with ADHD. Across contexts, helping professionals (i.e., therapists, prescribers, educators, coaches) might benefit from an engagement strategy toolbox to facilitate work with adolescents with ADHD and their families.

METHOD

The current study describes the development and psychometric testing of the ADHD Engagement Process Code (AEPC), a measure that operationalizes engagement strategies in the context of a blended behavioral/motivational interviewing treatment for adolescent ADHD (Supporting Teens' Autonomy Daily; STAND). The AEPC also operationalizes in-session parent and adolescent engagement-related behaviors. Behavior counts and global codes were coded for 840 audio-recorded STAND sessions delivered by 21 therapists to 121 adolescents. Subsets of tapes were double coded using the AEPC's parent, adolescent, and therapist coding systems to assess kappa for line-by-line verbalizations and intraclass correlations for session-level behavior counts and global scores. Construct validity was assessed. We explored low frequency and low variability codes and examined correlations between codes.

RESULTS

AEPC codes possessed good to excellent inter-rater reliability and strong discriminant validity. Three low frequency codes and one low variability global were identified indicating opportunities for AEPC refinement.

CONCLUSIONS

The AEPC is publicly available (https://osf.io/kshfy/) and offers a library of adolescent-specific codes for those interested in measuring provider, parent, or adolescent engagement behaviors in relevant populations or contexts.

Taking a Motivational Interviewing Approach to Prevention Science: Progress and Extensions

This commentary reviews advances gleaned from the current set of papers to Motivational Interviewing (MI) in prevention science. We begin by acknowledging the pioneering work of Miller and Rollnick to develop the construct of MI, then Dishion's use of MI principles to adapt applications of MI for the field of prevention science. We then highlight some of the contributions provided by the current set of papers and other recent extensions of MI. These novel applications are directed to parents, teachers, and older youth in the service of facilitating behavior change to promote youth development.