Navigating the international dissemination of an evidence-based intervention: Scaling with fidelity and cultural-specificity

Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up (ABC), an evidence-based parenting program, monitors intervention fidelity and provides fidelity-focused supervision to providers, or “parent coaches,“ across one year of training. Recently, ABC dissemination has grown internationally, providing the opportunity for the ABC developer team to consider how to support intervention fidelity in an international context. The current manuscript describes early international dissemination efforts with local supervisors in Russia, Germany, and Norway. As part of ABC implementation, supervisors were trained in the in-the-moment commenting and coding system, a microanalytic behavioral coding system that measures fidelity to ABC. Local supervisors were also trained to provide fidelity-focused supervision. The present study found that supervisors were able to achieve coding reliability after engaging in an intensive week-long training, with reliability scores similar to supervisors who had gone through coding training in the United States. Supervisors were then able to deliver fidelity-focused supervision in the parent coaches’ native language, without the need to include an ABC staff member during the supervision meetings or provide translation of their behavioral coding. At the end of their training year, on average, parent coaches in the Russian, German, and Norwegian cohorts all met the fidelity requirements to gain certification in ABC, with fidelity data similar to those of parent coaches delivering ABC in the United States. Results from this evaluation demonstrate that an evidence-based parenting program with rigorous fidelity monitoring can be successfully transported from the United States to international contexts, with ongoing communication and collaboration between the developer site and international partners around language, culture, and fidelity-focused consultation as a key component of this dissemination.