Game facilitators also made systematic observations of sessions.
These accounts were supplemented by our own occasional observations of sessions, visits to the schools and conversations with school staff and children and through conversations with the arts practitioners both within and outside the school.
Our primary outcome measure is an objective assessment made by an expert panel, our secondary measures utilise self-informant or key informant reports and our process evaluation includes coded and descriptive accounts of the intervention delivery and participation made during observations of sessions, semistructured interviews and written participant feedback.
We used a direct observation checklist recommended by the Government of India for on-site observation of session sites.
Observation of sessions and feedback from parents also suggested that the curriculum could be improved by condensing didactic activities that took too long to deliver, shortening several mindfulness activities, and conducting experiential mindfulness activities with periods of silence rather than with verbal guidance throughout.
To explore the dose and fidelity of SFS coaching sessions, 50 semi-structured observations of coaching sessions took place (10 for each activity type).
Kane and Staiger (2012) found that two trained individuals each observing a single 45-min session of a teacher's class have a reliability score of 0.67 (i.e., observations are more likely to be due to a characteristic of the teacher and not due to a particular observer), and this paired observation of one session is just as reliable as having independent observations of four sessions.
The research team will review weekly session logs from YMCA instructors for potential departure from the EPIC Kids model, and conduct repeated observations of intervention sessions.
The data was collected through the use of a questionnaire which was developed by the researcher, and unstructured observations of dissection sessions.
Future studies can also use direct observations of treatment sessions in dental offices to validate our results.
Notably, direct observations of coaching sessions confirmed that messages were not always delivered as outlined in the manual.
