Behavioral Parenting Skills as a Novel Target for Improving Pediatric Medication Adherence

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Abstract This parent grant (R01CA258337-01A1) for this supplement focuses on the relationship between parenting skills and medication adherence in young children diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), the most common pediatric cancer. Parents are tasked with giving daily medications for oral chemotherapy at home, an experience that can be marked by parent-child conflict, logistical difficulties, and distress. In order to develop an intervention to minimize barriers to successful medication administration, it is critical to understand parental skills, behaviors, and experiences with giving pediatric cancer patients medication at-home. One of the aims of this parent grant-funded study uses direct observation of medication administration via video recording in the home to collect objective data to characterize the specific parenting experiences at the daily and episode levels that shape medication administration in young children. Initial reviews of video-recorded direct observations of parents administering medications point to an opportunity to augment the existing quantitative coding schemes with newly developed qualitative coding schemes. The candidate for this supplement will benefit from the opportunity to expand her existing research expertise in caregiving science by creating a qualitative coding scheme that captures nuanced contextual data about medication administration in the home setting. The candidate for this supplement will also build on the parent project by analyzing associations between parents' sociodemographic data and medication administration in order to identify potential patterns of disparities in medication adherence outcomes, thus contributing to her goal to strengthen her experience in disparities research. Finally, in order to fulfill the candidate's goal of broadening her expertise in health literacy, she will extend the parent project's aim of considering parental health literacy as a potential correlate of medication adherence experiences by conducting additional analysis of the health literacy variable to identify potential associations with parental caregiver's sociodemographic traits. Findings from these activities will fill gaps in knowledge about modifiable factors (caregiver behaviors and health literacy skills) that can be addressed via targeted interventions to improve patient outcomes and mitigate disparities.