News - November 2002
Programme has long-term benefits for children
A study in Lithuania has shown that children who took part in Zippy's Friends have maintained the skills that they learned one year later.
A group of 314 children, mostly from kindergartens in the capital, Vilnius, were enrolled in 2000-2001. They were evaluated before and after taking part in the programme, and their progress was compared to 104 children in a control group.
The evaluation showed that children in Zippy's Friends showed significant improvements in co-operation, assertion, self-control and empathy. Problem behaviours of externalising and hyperactivity decreased, and there was a significant increase in the number of coping mechanisms used by children to resolve problems.
These findings were very encouraging. But the evaluators wanted to know whether the programme's benefits would last - so, a 'one year on' study was commissioned.
Of the original group of 314 children, 229 were observed and interviewed for the follow-up study. However, tracing children from the control group proved difficult. Of the original 104, 73 were located, but 26 of them had since participated in Zippy's Friends. This meant that they could not be used for control purposes - and that, in turn, meant that the control group was too small to be statistically reliable.
So, the evaluators limited their analyses to determining whether the significant changes that children in the programme had displayed were maintained one year later.
Each child was individually interviewed, and data was also collected from teachers. The interviewers were the same professionals who conducted the interviews a year earlier, and they were not told whether or not the children had participated in Zippy's Friends.
The results, revealed this month, are impressive. All the social skills and problem behaviours which improved from pre-test to post-test scores in the original evaluation were found to have maintained their improved level one year later, based upon teacher observations and interviews with the children.
The evaluators noted that, without a control group, it was possible that the improvements might not have been related to the Zippy's Friends programme, and recommended further studies. However, they added: 'We have no reason to believe that children who did not participate in the programme and who scored significantly lower on all these measures one year earlier would have spontaneously improved their social skills, decreased their problem behaviours and improved their coping abilities over the course of that year.'
They concluded that the effects of Zippy's Friends are sustained for at least one year after the end of the programme.
Responding to the study, Partnership for Children director Chris Bale said: 'The findings are good news, because the whole aim of the programme is to teach children skills which will help them not only now but throughout their lives. But clearly we need more evidence, and so we are now trying to set up further studies.'