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J Child Fam Stud (2012) 21:626636 DOI 10.1007/s10826-011-9514-8
ORIGINAL PAPER
Using Consumer Input to Tailor Evidence-Based Parenting Interventions to the Needs of Grandparents
James N. Kirby Matthew R. Sanders
Published online: 25 June 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
Abstract Grandparents provide a signicant amount of child care to their grandchildren. However, there is limited research investigating whether grandparents would view a parenting program developed specically for them as useful. Our study adopted a consumer focused perspective to program design and examined the challenges encountered by grandparents in their role as an informal child care provider. Focus groups were conducted with fourteen grandparents (11 females, 3 males) aged 4576 years (M = 60.14) the majority of whom provided 1120 h of care per week to their grandchild. A thematic analysis indicated that grandparents have difculty managing the relationship with the parents and remembering effective parenting strategies. In addition, grandparents also indicated wanting further strategies to cope with the stressors associated with the role, particularly surrounding feelings of frustration and guilt. These results suggest that grandparents could benet from a parenting program and this paper argues that an existing evidence-based parenting program should be modied. In terms of implications for program design the inclusion of a module centered on improving grandparentparent communication and partner support may buffer potential conict and tension that can arise in co-parenting situations.
Keywords Consumers Grandparenting Parenting
Qualitative research Focus group
Introduction
With the proliferation of evidence-based parenting programs it is important that a consumer perspective to program design is adopted by program developers, researchers, service providers, and funders. We have argued previously that better engagement with consumers has the potential to improve the quality and ecological t of interventions and their evaluation with specic target groups (Sanders and Kirby 2011). Engagement with consumers at the program design stage has the added benet of promoting client interest in the success of the program, cooperation, and delity. There are many avenues available to program developers to increase the engagement of consumers and one such way is to provide population specic variants of existing evidence-based programs (Mazzucchelli and Sanders 2010).
Evidence-based parenting programs (EBPPs) are programs that have been rigorously evaluated through randomized control trials and show increased positive parenting practices and reduced ineffective...