Occupational Performance Coaching With Parents of Young Children With Developmental Disability

Summary

Participation in community activities allows children to meet friends, learns new skills, fosters independence, and paves the foundation for lifelong health. High rates of community participation restriction have been reported in children with developmental disabilities who are aged six years or below, a critical developmental period.

Occupational Performance Coaching (OPC), grounded in self-determination theory, is aimed to facilitate children's participation in life situations through coaching parents. Studies have shown that OPC is effective to promote children's activity participation. However, there have been limited randomized controlled trials demonstrating the efficacy of OPC, especially with the specific focus on children's community participation.

The investigators propose to evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of conducting a pilot randomized controlled trial of OPC for parents of preschool children with developmental disabilities in Hong Kong, and to test its initial efficacy on promoting children's community participation.

Conditions

• Developmental Disability

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Occupational Performance coaching

The OPC intervention comprises three components: (1) connect - building parents' trust in the coach by using verbal and nonverbal strategies; (2) structure - building parents' competence by adopting a problem-solving framework of setting goals, exploring options, planning action, carrying out plans, checking performance, and generalizing; and (3) share - building parents' autonomy by reciprocally exchanging information between the coach and parents with an emphasis on eliciting parents existing knowledge. During the exploration of the options for a particular goal, collaborative performance analysis is used. The coach follows the four steps to (a) identify parents' perception of what currently happens, (b) identify what they would like to happen, (c) explore barriers and bridges to the desired performance, and (d) identify their needs for taking actions to achieve goals. Parents are guided to find strategies to facilitate their child's performance to support goal achievement.

BEHAVIORAL

Parent consultation

The parent consultation consists of the use of the toolbox to provide parents with available environmental resources and strategies to enhance community participation of their child with developmental disability, followed by the understanding of current situation and the identification of problems encountered by parents. Direct informing approach will be used to instruct parents about the availability of environmental resources close to their living areas and what they can plan to do by using possible supportive strategies. In addition, information about child disability and/or developmental milestone may be provided if needed.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Food and Health Bureau, Hong Kong

  collaborator OTHER_GOV

• University of Otago

  collaborator OTHER

• National Cheng Kung University

  collaborator OTHER

• The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Chi-Wen Chien · The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

TREATMENT

Masking

DOUBLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

24 Months

Max Age

83 Months

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2021-08-01

Primary Completion

2022-12-31

Completion

2023-02-28

Countries

• Hong Kong

Study Locations