From day hospital back to school: identifying conditions for successful school reintegration

Abstract

The transition from child and adolescent psychiatric day hospitals back to regular school settings is a potentially challenging transition for patients, their parents, and teachers. Frequently, teachers express feelings of deficient self-efficacy regarding their capability to meet individual needs of a child after discharge in the classroom context. Presumably, such concerns lead to a setback to improvements achieved during day hospital treatments. Therefore, our aims are (1) to understand conditions for successful school-reintegration in the transition from day hospital back to regular schooling experienced by children/adolescents, parents, and teachers and (2) to reveal same-person and across-person associations between self-regulation and self-efficacy on between- and within-person levels. Taking an everyday life and multi-informant perspective assessment, we implement a smartphone-based diary study. Children, their parents and their teachers rate self-regulation, self-efficacy and daily stressors on 50 consecutive days, starting two weeks before discharge. We expect to gain insights on the impact of a child’s context on its ability to regulate its behavior during that transition phase. In particular, we expect an impact of the teacher’s and parent’s pedagogical self-efficacy on the child’s self-reported self-regulation on a daily basis. So far we completed the item selection, programed the web-based experience sampling software and piloted the procedure. The main data collection will start in March 2016. The obstacles and benefits of a smartphone-based diary study in a sample of children suffering from psychological burden are discussed and considerations for the improvement of a post day hospital intervention are made.