Review of Stress Inoculation Taining with Children and Adolescents: Issues and Recommendations

Stress inoculation training (SIT) is a cognitive-behavioral intervention that has been applied to a wide array of problems and populations. Although it has received considerable attention in the adult treatment literature, less research has been conducted with child and adolescent populations. Its most appealing qualities include its applicability to a wide variety of populations, settings, and problems, the structured training format it offers practitioners in which to match intervention strategies to identified individual-specific deficits, and format for programming generalization. In this article, the authors provide an overview of SIT, including a description of phase components and issues related to child and adolescent problems, and they review the treatment studies with these populations. Of the eight studies reviewed, none reported an attempt to identify the nature of trainees’ performance problems, differentially employing intervention strategies to individual-specific deficits, nor programming for generalization. Implications for SIT with children and adolescents are offered.