RESEARCH & PROJECTS

Past Projects and Community-Based Evaluations

Let’s Connect (group and individual format) has been evaluated in both clinical and community settings with families from diverse backgrounds. Our community partners have included several agencies that provide mental health and/or prevention services for youth and families. Across these projects, Let’s Connect outcomes are promising: 

 Let’s Connect is associated with increased:

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  • Parent/caregiver emotional awareness and regulation

  • Parent/caregiver supportive emotion communication practices

  • Child cooperation

  • Effective discipline practices

  • Children’s social and emotional competence

  • Treatment engagement when used as a strategic enhancement to an evidence-based treatment for child trauma

Let’s Connect is associated with decreased:

  • Parent/caregiver unsupportive or invalidating emotion communication practices

  • Parenting stress

  • Child behavioral concerns

  • Child exposure to violence

Let’s Connect has been designated as a promising practice by the National Child Traumatic Stress Network:

NCTSN Promising Practices Fact Sheet

NCTSN Culture Specific Fact Sheet

Current Projects and Community-Based Evaluations

A current project with partners at the Colorado Department of Human Services and local child/family-serving organizations is underway to evaluate Let’s Connect as a prevention program to increase safety, permanency and wellbeing for child-welfare involved families. To accomplish these goals, we are evaluating the efficacy of Let’s Connect as compared to a ‘services as usual’ group with regard to parent, child, and family outcomes.  Services as usual consist of the services currently offered to the families as part of their involvement or connection to child welfare.  We are also building capacity and long-term sustainability for community agencies to offer Let’s Connect to the families they serve.

The Let’s Connect team conducted a randomized clinical trial conducted in partnership with Aurora Mental Health Center to evaluate the effectiveness of Let’s Connect as a strategic enhancement to Trauma Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT) as compared to stand alone TF-CBT for children exposed to trauma and their families. This project was a cooperative agreement with OJJDP and the RAND corporation. Coding of observational and interview data is underway to evaluate the impact of the these interventions on parent’s own emotion related skills (awareness, regulation), parents’ emotion communication skills, supportive quality of parent-child interaction, and child social, emotional, and behavioral outcomes.

Publications