Preventing disruptive behavior in early elementary schoolchildren: impact of a universal classroom-based preventive intervention

Knowledge about the development of children with disruptive behaviors, leading to disruptive disorders and related poor outcomes, guides prevention research in the development and evaluation of preventive interventions. The overview of effective interventions in this chapter showed that several effective intervention strategies are available to intervene in the development of disruptive behavior. Most of the development and evidence for effective prevention programs is based on studied in the USA. Consequently, these prevention programs are developed for use in the USA. It was therefore decided to develop a universal, classroom based preventive intervention for use in the Netherlands and determine the impact of this intervention. The main purpose of the present study was to examine the impact of Good Behavior Game (GBG; Barrish et aL, 1969; Dolan et aL, 1989) on the development of disruptive behaviors in young elementary schoolchildren in the Netherlands. The GBG a universal, classroom based preventive intervention program. In addition, the purpose was to study risk factors in the child, familial and parenting domain that predict whether children will or will not respond to the intervention. The secondary purpose of this study was to further our knowledge about developmental psychopathology. This was done by studying the characteristics of groups of children with similar patterns of disruptive behaviors and by studying developmental trajectories of children's aggression, the characteristics at onset as well as the consequences for following a specific developmental trajectory.

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