Guideline on parenting programmes to prevent child maltreatment

Guideline on parenting programmes to prevent child maltreatment and promote positive development in children aged 0-17 years: Prioritizing Outcomes

Dear GDG members,

Thank you for your participation in the GDG meeting held in July 2020. The supplementary document sent with the link to this questionnaire lists the four PICOS questions that we agreed to ask.

As you will recall, we identified 15 parental and child outcomes for which we will retrieve and summarise evidence through systematic reviews. Of these, up to seven outcomes will need to be prioritized for assessing the certainty of evidence – these prioritized outcomes will be most important for formulating recommendations and overall guideline development. The adverse health effects and programme implementation outcomes will be included in all reviews and do not need to be prioritized.

Prioritization of outcomes

Identification of important outcomes for decision-making will be determined through standard GRADE methods and will involve surveying members of the GDG for ratings on a 9-point ordinal scale. As noted below:

Critical outcomes (rating 7-9), and important outcomes (ratings 4-6) will be rated for the certainty of evidence and will inform the strength of recommendations.

Not important outcomes (rating 1-3) will not be rated for certainty of evidence and will not inform the strength of recommendations.

The GDG will be asked to consider the outcomes from the perspectives of government officials and non-government organization staff responsible for initiating or maintaining the development and delivery of parenting programmes. For outcomes scored critical or important, the certainty of evidence identified through systematic reviews will be rated; for outcomes scored not important, the certainty of evidence will not be rated.

When mean scores for outcomes exceed 6.9 they will be considered critical for the development of a recommendation. Mean ratings in the range of 4.0 – 6.9 will define outcomes considered as important for the development of a recommendation and that will still be incorporated into the GRADE Evidence Profiles. Outcomes scoring 3.9 or less will not be reported in the GRADE Evidence Profiles; these may nevertheless be informative in wording a recommendation but will not influence its direction or strength.

Prioritization will be done through a step-wise process, where the GDG completes a first set of ratings, the chairs then feed back to the GDG with comments on the first set of ratings aimed at highlighting what’s critical, and the GDG is again consulted, with the process repeated until we get consensus.

To rate the outcomes please score the outcomes listed below on a scale from 1 to 9, where 7–9 rates the outcome as critical for decision-making, 4–6 rates an outcome as important and 1–3 rates an outcome as unimportant. As much as possible/sensible, please make use of the full range of possible scores.

Thank you very much for your time and support.

About you

This field allows us to track who has completed the survey. This information will not be shared, and all responses will be aggregated.

Last name

First name

Outcomes

Score each outcome on importance for decision making:

7 to 9: critical

4 to 6: important

1 to 3: unimportant

To rate each outcome, please click the down arrow on the right of each box and select the value you wish to assign.

1. Parental self-efficacy

2. Parental mental health and stress

3. Parental attitudes towards corporal punishment

4. Positive parenting knowledge, attitudes and beliefs

5. Positive parenting skills and behaviour

6. Harsh and negative parenting

7. Parental monitoring and supervision of child

8. Parent-child relationship and communication

9. Child maltreatment

10. Intimate partner violence

11. Child externalizing/behavioural problems (e.g. conduct, oppositional, delinquency, drug use)

12. Child internalizing problems (e.g. anxiety, depression, PTSD, others)

13. Child development (e.g. cognition, language outcomes, growth)

14. Child physical health

15. Rate of care seeking (by child or for child by parent/caregiver)

Adverse health effects of outcomes and Implementation outcomes

Adverse outcomes reported will be included in all systematic reviews.

All reviews will also code for the following implementation outcomes:

Enrolment and attendance
Quality of delivery and programme fidelity
Satisfaction with programme

Your survey responses will be strictly confidential, and results will be reported only in the aggregate. If you have questions at any time about the survey or the procedures, please contact Alex Butchart (butcharta@who.int).