A Pilot Study of a Brief Motivational Intervention to Enhance Parental Engagement: A Brief Report

Although research has shown that multi-systemic interventions (MSIs) improve youth psychosocial functioning, MSI dissemination has been hampered by low levels of parent participation. The current pilot project was designed to examine the effectiveness of a brief motivational interviewing (MI) protocol to increase parental engagement in an MSI for youth suspended from middle and high school. Preliminary findings suggest that parents who received brief MI were more likely to attend a parent-training workshop and reported greater satisfaction with the parenting workshops than parents who did not. Parents in the brief MI group also reported a relatively high level of satisfaction with the MI procedures. Implications for future research and MSIs are discussed.