WSU psychologist studies conduct problems in children

By Amy Geiszler-Jones

Stories about teens committing senseless violent acts inevitably lead to questions. Why did they do it? Was there anything that parents, teachers or fellow students could have done to stop the destructive behavior?

As a parent, Jim Snyder has those questions, too. As a clinical child psychologist, he’s trying to find answers.

He thinks one solution may be prevention/early intervention before children even start school.

Finding solutions to youth violence is so valuable that in 1998 the National Institute of Mental Health gave Snyder a five-year $2.5 million grant to develop a prevention/early intervention model.

For the past year, Snyder and a group of doctoral psychology students and other research assistants have been watching 80 kindergartners interact with classmates, teachers and families as part of the project "Child Conduct Problems Competing Socialization Models."

Over the next two years, until spring 2001, he and the rest of the observers will continue to assess the social relationships, conduct problems and academic performance of these and 170 more children and families.

Each child is observed for about four hours interacting with family, either at home, at the school or in a special room in Jabara Hall. The researchers also spend another eight hours watching each child’s interaction with their schoolmates on the playground and their actions in the classroom.

Based on those observations, recorded on videotape and paper, Snyder will put together his prevention/early intervention model.

He’s deliberately chosen to do his observations at a school that has a high percentage of "at-risk" families. While some of these families are skilled at parenting, others are less so, and the stress of these families’ lives — being among the working poor or headed by a single, young parent — can sometimes lead to kids who already experience problems by the time they enter school.

"There’s a fair amount of research out there that suggests kids who have serious problems later on started (with problems) earlier in development," he says. There are theories, as well, about what causes little kids who act badly to grow up into teens capable of violent, antisocial behavior.

"Different theories say different things are important in influencing development," Snyder says. Some say those risk factors are poor parental discipline, others say peer rejection or difficulty keeping emotions in check.

While each theory has been tested and proven, no one has tested these theories in combination.

That’s where Snyder’s research differs. He’s putting three different theories dealing with conduct problems, social relationships and academic development to the test at one time. By doing that, he’ll see which of the risk factors emerge as the most important in predicting violent behavior.

Why test them all together? Because usually it’s a combination of things that lead to a young life gone wrong.

What’s turning out violent kids are the thousands and thousands of aversive, conflictual interactions they experience at home, before they go to school," says Snyder who has been researching and counseling families and children for 20 years.

"They carry that suitcase of aversive behavior tactics to school and employ it with peers and teachers. Peers, of course, don’t like them then. They have problems with teachers because they don’t follow the rules. Over time, as they move through elementary school to middle school, they start to fail at peer relationships, fail in school and hang out with other deviant, antisocial peers because birds of a feather really do flock together. A 16-, 17-, 18-year-old delinquent is really the end product of a long developmental path. What we’re trying to do is get a handle on that early portion of that path."

Snyder’s experience working with juvenile delinquents 20 years ago in New York City showed him that it’s difficult and expensive to get kids in their late teens to change their behavior.

"If we’re trying to change a lot of risk factors — some here, some there — that gets very expensive. If we want to do affordable intervention, we need to know which are the most powerful causes," he says. "This research is not so much discovering new things as it is taking all those risk factors that have already been identified, and then determining which ones are most important or how they work together. From that, hopefully, we’ll develop more affordable intervention."

WSU researcher Jim Snyder is spending a lot of time on a playground lately, observing children as part of a five-year study on conduct problems. "Watching kids interact on playgrounds is absolutely fascinating," says Snyder who has studied and counseled families and children for 20 years.