TRAINING CHILDREN TO COPE AND PARENTS TO COACH THEM DURING ROUTINE IMMUNIZATIONS - EFFECTS ON CHILD, PARENT, AND STAFF BEHAVIORS

Preparation of this research was made possible by NIMH grant R29 MH44301 and by support from The Institute for Behavioral Research at The University of Georgia. We wish to thank Will Denton, Moye Davis, Suzanne Watkins, and the nursing staff of the Tuscaloosa County Health Department for their cooperation during and facilitation of the conducting of this project; Lynda Harrison for her consultation at several points throughout the study; and Maria Evans, Marlene Justice, Carol Pinkard, and Patti Thomas for their help with transcribing and other aspects of the processing of these data. Also, we wish to acknowledge our appreciation to Jan Wallander for his helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. Address correspondence concerning this article to Ronald L. Blount, Department of Psychology, University of Georgia, Athens GA 30602-3013. Preschool children (n = 30) undergoing routine immunizations at a health department were taught to use distraction prior to the medical procedure and to use a party blower, as an age appropriate version of deep breathing, just prior to and during the injection. Parents were taught to coach their children. A no-treatment control group (n = 30) was used to evaluate effectiveness. Results indicated that trained parents engaged in more prompting of their child to use the blower than untrained parents. Trained children engaged in more blower usage than untrained children. Child distress was lower on two of three observational measures for the trained children. Parents of trained children reported that both they and their children were less distressed when compared to how they normally would be during the procedures. Staff, who were not trained nor instructed to change their behavior, engaged in significantly more coaching of trained than of untrained children to use the blower, suggesting generalization of the behavior from parents to staff. Suggestions for future research are included.