Preventing adolescents’ externalizing and internalizing symptoms : effects of the Penn Resiliency Program

This study reports secondary outcome analyses from a past study of the Penn Resiliency Program (PRP), a cognitive-behavioral depression prevention program for middle-school aged children. Middle school students (N = 697) were randomly assigned to PRP, PEP (an alternate intervention), or control conditions. Gillham et al., (2007) reported analyses examining PRP’s effects on average and clinical levels of depression symptoms. We examine PRP’s effects on parent-, teacher-, and self-reports of adolescents’ externalizing and broader internalizing (depression/anxiety, somatic complaints, and social withdrawal) symptoms over three years of follow-up. Relative to no intervention control, PRP reduced parent-reports of adolescents’ internalizing symptoms beginning at the first assessment after the intervention and persisting for most of the follow-up assessments. PRP also reduced parent-reported conduct problems relative to no-intervention. There was no evidence that the PRP program produced an effect on teacher- or self-report of adolescents’ symptoms. Overall, PRP did not reduce symptoms relative to the alternate intervention, although there is a suggestion of a delayed effect for conduct problems. These findings are discussed with attention to developmental trajectories and the importance of interventions that address common risk factors for diverse forms of negative outcomes.peer-reviewe

A transition model for quality-of-life data with non-ignorable non-monotone missing data

In this paper, we consider a full likelihood method to analyze continuous longitudinal responses with nonignorable non-monotone missing data. We consider a transition probability model for the missingness mechanism. A first-order Markov dependence structure is assumed for both the missingness mechanism and observed data. This process fits the natural data structure in the longitudinal framework. Our main interest is in estimating the parameters of the marginal model and evaluating the missing-at-random assumption in the Effects of Public Information Study, a cancer-related study recently conducted at the University of Pennsylvania. We also present a simulation study to assess the performance of the model