How
Can ICDP Program be Evaluated in a Sensible Way? previous
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As this is not an external package program of a
behavioural nature, but a sensitising program where consciousness-raising
of personal interaction with one’s child and facilitation
of existing positive behavioural patterns is the key issue, then
the evaluation of this intention may be slightly different from
the traditional approach within this field.
It has to make sense and be in line with the naive
theories of those who implement it otherwise it will not be sustainable.
Some points to consider:
1. ICDP can be one of many other factors influencing
a child's life-career or life-path. Long term changes are necessarily
multi-causal. ICDP could have long-term effect but the social landscape
through which a child is going to travel (develop) is too complex
and full of other obstacle that it would be naive to think there
should be a direct single-causal connection between intervention
and outcome in the child many years later. Such expectations could
only be based on simplistic Cartesian conceptions of mental change
that would directly manifest in behaviour, but we also live in a
complex social world where the behaviour and life-career of a child
is not only a reflection of the ideal intentions or even caring
behaviour of a mother. Therefore it is unrealistic and naive to
expect that upgrading the quality of interaction between caregiver
and child should necessarily be reflected in the child's improved
adaptation at school or other simple social measures. I would say
this applies to all early intervention programs.... It springs from
the engineering assumption that human beings can be predicted like
simple physical events.
2. Secondly, it is not likely according to the same
line of reasoning that intervention-treatment maybe from 5 to 20
meetings should necessarily have long-term effects. It may have
a long-term effect in cases such as when the positive cycle of interactions
that has slipped out of its normal course and is brought back to
normality through facilitative interactive moves. Under such conditions
we can expect a long-term effect. But this may not be the case for
most of our interactive behaviour. Intervention may not only require
restoration of interactive patterns out of track, it may require
the acquisition of new patterns of interaction and these may need
continuous support to become sustainable. Under such circumstances
these patterns will probably need long-term contingent support and
a relevant supportive milieu with recurrent situations that gradually
transform these patterns into adaptive everyday routines. When we
think in more a multi-causal ways about intervention, we should
also consider intervening and preparing the social landscape of
human encounters, situations or what Weiner calls "activity
episodes" in order to provide a contingent support-system for
the newly emerging interactive patterns. This concept of intervention
is different from the classical Cartesian or medical intervention,
where the basic idea is to repair a part that is deficient. In this
case the reparation is in both acquiring new patterns of interaction
with a social support system that is a natural part of the socio-cultural
landscape. In order for that to materialize we need to assess whether
this pattern does fit in and has natural supportive contexts or
activity episodes within that cultural framework.
If we think of our competencies and skills as multi-causal
- that it depends upon a series of supports and contingencies:
2. What is then the point?
The point is to raise the quality of care for the
immediate benefit of the mother and the child. To make it more understandable
and predictable, to see the child as a human being, to bring this
domain into a frame of understanding and feeling that would make
it more humane, more interpretable and more in line with our best
cultural and moral intuitions of how human beings are and should
be. By taking our children as sensitive, intentional and emotional
human persons that are understandable and interpretable within our
cultural traditions we may contribute to making them that - namely
what we assume.
In other words,
this is an interpretive enterprise, that could have long-term developmental
consequences, probably better chances than programs without anchorage
in human common sense, but still this is too pretentious for any
early intervention program that operates only in the caregiver -
child dyad. ...cont. on next page
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