Aim Inaccurate maternal observation skills predict poor treatment outcomes for conduct problem children and successful interventions must identify and address these parental deficits. Unfortunately measuring parental observational skills is a time-consuming activity. Professional coders coded the same tape enabling a comparison to be made between their judgements and the mothers'. Problem solving is associated with both negative observational bias and poor autobiographical memory.
Problem solving depends on recall of past strategies and solutions.
Next Steps Conduct problems represent a large clinical service demand with poor outcomes proving costly for all. Within the clinical sample the MEPS showed a correlation with negative maternal bias and it appears, from this study, to be measuring something that is related to both autobiographical memory and maternal attending bias. Further investigation into how parental observation, autobiographical memory and problem solving skill deficits are related and how their negative effects on treatment outcome can be remedied are needed. A quick way of assessing parental observation skills is still needed and work is continuing to establish whether parents of conduct problem children show similar deficits when coding the behaviour of a child that is not their own since this is a much less time consuming to measure.