Heather J. Risser, Ph.D. is Visiting Assistant Research Professor with the Interdisciplinary Center for Research on Violence at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Dr. Risser received a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology with a specialization in child development and family violence in 2008. Dr. Risser received advanced training in family violence (Center for the Study of Family Violence & Sexual Assault) funded through a T32 training grant from NIMH.

She also received her M.A. in Marriage and Family Therapy in 1997. Dr. Risser has had extensive experience working with parents and families involved with child protective services in multiple mental health agencies. As a Marriage and Family Therapist, Dr. Risser was the parent specialist in a specialized sexual abuse recovery program for children.

Dr. Risser facilitated multiple parent-training groups and was contracted by the Department of Children and Families (DCF) in Southeastern Connecticut to provide parent training to DCF-involved parents. Dr. Risser has also had multiple years of experience with Intensive Family Preservation (in-home service provision) in both Connecticut and Massachusetts.

Most recently Dr. Risser completed her Clinical Psychology Internship at South Shore Mental Health in which she worked within a multidisciplinary team to provide crisis evaluation and intensive wrap-around therapy for children with severe emotional and behavioral problems and their families.

Dr. Risser's research focuses on parenting and family risk and protective factors related to children’s exposure to violence. Dr. Risser’s previous clinical experience providing mental health services to children exposed to violence and their families provides a foundation for understanding the link between research and direct services.

Dr. Risser is also involved in evaluation of services designed to prevent children’s exposure to violence and program development, training and implementation of policy and practice to prevent children’s exposure to violence.

1. What is your experience with the Integrated Parent Intervention Program designed to reduce and prevent child maltreatment? In what settings have you used it prior to this Foundations for Success collaborative project with ICVP? Can you briefly explain the goals of the IPIP program?

I have used parts of the program in various contexts serving children and families. One very successful application was in a group setting with parents and teens as part of a wrap-around service program for youth with serious emotional and behavioral problems. The goals of the model are to combine aspects of evidence-based practices and bring these practices to community-based treatment making it more accessible to a wider range of clients and presenting problems.

2.  What drew you to research and practice in this area?

I am primarily interested in how cognition impacts social information processing related to children and parenting. Social information processing models of parenting propose that properties of parenting-related knowledge (e.g., content, accessibility) interact with information processing activities during parent-child interaction to guide parent behavior. Stored knowledge structures called preexisting schemata are thought to develop through repeated experiences that, over time, get stored as mental representations of social information. Once developed, preexisting schemata in the form of discipline-related beliefs and attitudes are thought to function as cognitive filters that guide evaluations of child behavior, discipline choice, evaluations of discipline effectiveness and expectations for future child behavior. The activation of a preexisting schema is thought to guide information processing, often strengthening the association between the social information and the related schemata. For example, the more often a parent sees a child discontinue his/her behavior in immediate response to a spank, the more likely the parent is to view spanking as an effective discipline method. The more frequently a schema is activated, the more accessible it is thought to become. That is, the more frequently a parent uses spanking to discipline the child, the more likely the parent will think of spanking as a viable disciplinary option in the future. Prior to having children, there is evidence to suggest that individuals develop preexisting schemata for spanking based on the discipline they received as a child.

3.  What have the outcomes shown with regard to the use of the IPIP program? What were highlights from your findings that you think are most important for people and practitioners to understand?

We are still pilot-testing the curriculum, so we don’t have outcome results yet. But, we have seen very high retention with both teens and parents. It has been encouraging to see 100% retention with fathers who typically have a much lower completion rate when it comes to therapeutic interventions. Granted, this was a small sample, but it is encouraging nonetheless. So, if the child abuse prevention application of IPIP can engage fathers, the curriculum may be able to reduce risk and prevent maltreatment in parents that may not otherwise be engaging in services.

4.  What drew your interest to collaborate with ICVP for the "Foundations for Success" child abuse prevention train-the-trainer program? What was the vision of this project from your perspective?

In examining the disparities in access to services in low-income, urban areas it occurred to me that increasing informal systems of care (e.g., networks of child-serving agencies) may decrease certain obstacles to treatment. I became aware of ICVP’s Foundations for Success just as I was pondering issues related to increased access to care in underserved populations.

5.  What would the three most crucial recommendations be for service providers to increase effective child abuse prevention and reduce rates of child maltreatment in their communities?

That is a really hard question. From the perspective of a clinical psychologist I would say parent support and evidence-based interventions focused on promoting positive relationships, emotion regulation/mindfulness, and decreasing cognitive bias. From the perspective of public health, I would say community partnerships, access to services, and primary prevention initiatives that provide the public with accessible, information, tools and skills.

6.  What are some of the realities/barriers that service providers face in preventing child abuse? And given these challenges (funding, staff shortages, etc.), what are the most realistic and accessible steps that agencies can take in their communities to effectively decrease the prevalence of child abuse in their communities?

In terms of primary prevention, messages that give parents information about actions to take to promote healthy child development (e.g., praising children’s efforts to follow expectations). In terms of secondary prevention efforts, better screening for risk so that resources can focus on those who are at risk.

7.  What evaluation protocols or models do you recommend to successfully assess child abuse prevention and reduction in child maltreatment rates?

The evaluation plan is typically tailored to address specific goals of the project. There are several different types of evaluations designed to assess different aspects of a project. Evaluations can explore a program’s readiness for evaluation. This type of evaluation, called an evaluability assessment can be paired with activities to build capacity for participating in an evaluation. For example, if a program wants to participate in a national evaluation, the national organization may want the program to undergo an evaluability assessment to be sure that the program has adequately trained staff and adequate capacity and resources to implement the program while collecting data necessary for a rigorous evaluation. An outcome evaluation typically explores the relationship between the program objectives and the outcomes of interest to evaluate the effectiveness of a program. For example, a program that has the stated objective to reduce physical forms of punishment would likely use a measure of type and frequency of punishment to assess the change in outcome as a result of program participation. A process evaluation documents the design and implementation of the program to assess whether the program is being implemented as designed, and documents the process of implementation to facilitate replication.

8.  What are some of the realities/barriers that service providers face in evaluating existing child abuse prevention programs/services? What are your recommendations to overcome them?

Two of the biggest barriers to conducting a rigorous evaluation of child abuse prevention programs/services evaluating the impact of primary prevention activities on communities and collecting longitudinal data to capture changes over time. One option would be to develop an ongoing online community survey that could document changes in community knowledge, perception, and behavior before and after deploying community initiatives.