Research
...development and provide warm emotional nurturance, children develop greater emotional competence, acquire larger vocabularies, perform better on a variety of cognitive measures, and achieve greater success academically (e.g., Bornstein and Tamis-LeMonda, 1989 M. Bornstein and C.S. Tamis-LeMonda, Maternal responsiveness and cognitive development in children. In: M.H. Bornstein, Editor, Maternal responsiveness: Characteristics and consequences, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco (1989), pp. 49–61.Bornstein and Tamis-LeMonda, 1989, Hart and Risley, 1995, Landry et al., 2001, Tomasello, 1988 and Weizman and Snow, 2001). In light of this established body of knowledge, numerous interventions have been developed to assist parents in developing the skills necessary to provide optimal support for their children's development (e.g., Bakermans-Kranenburg et al., 2003, Beckwith and Rodning, 1992 and Olds and Kitzman, 1993). Such interventions often target children at risk for less optimal outcomes due to biological (i.e., premature birth) or environmental (i.e., poverty, low maternal education) risk factors. A number of these studies have documented that improving maternal responsiveness skills results in improvements in young children's socioemotional development, attachment status, and cognitive skills (e.g., Anisfeld et al., 1990 and Gross et al., 2003).
In determining the success of these interventions, the focus of analyses has traditionally been on establishing group differences in outcomes between an intervention group and a control or comparison group. Results of such analyses can demonstrate whether parents and/or their children showed, on average, positive changes as a result of the intervention. However, there is typically little information available about how a given intervention may have differentially impacted different types of participants. Within an intervention...
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