The Effect of Parent-Child Interaction Therapy on Caregiver Rigidity, Job Satisfaction and Childhood Misbehavior

This research studied the effects of Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) training in a residential care facility for children with histories of maltreatment. Initially, five direct care staff were trained to provide an adapted version of PCIT to a randomly assigned child in the facility. The goal was to improve staff’s interactions with the children in their care and increase job satisfaction while decreasing the instances of misbehavior among those children. Data was recorded four times (pre, during, and post intervention) to assess the efficacy of the intervention and included completion of the Eyberg Child Behavior Inventory (ECBI), the Rigidity scale of the Child Abuse Potential Inventory (CAPI), and a Job Satisfaction Survey (JSS). Although the results did not provide statistical significance to support the hypothesis that training in PCIT would reduce instances of misbehavior, training in PCIT was associated with increased job satisfaction and decreased rigidity levels in direct care staff. Twenty eight additional participants were later added to test relationships between job satisfaction, child misbehavior and rigidity. Statistically significant relationships were found between perceived childhood misbehavior and caregiver rigidity, however correlations between child misbehaviors with job satisfaction and rigidity with job satisfaction did not yield statistical significance