Friday, 14 January 2005 - 12:00 PM

This presentation is part of: Poster Session I

Functioning Level across Public Systems of Care: Differences based on Adolescent Client Characteristics

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to determine if there are racial/ethnic, age, or gender differences in the rates of behavior problems of adolescents across public systems of care and if parental report of symptoms increased the likelihood of youth receiving services. Previous research suggests that minority youth have fewer behavior problems and receive fewer services than Caucasian youth, even when the severity of the problems is the same. Additionally, some studies used assessment tools that were only available in English; thus data collection of parental report of behavior problems was not possible (Hough et al., 2002). This study aims to demonstrate the need to include parent report when measuring adolescent behavior problems and service utilization patterns, making it necessary to use measurement tools available in multiple languages to obtain the most accurate measure of adolescents’ needs.

Methods: This study used a sample of 1,017 youth from data previously collected from the Patterns of Youth Mental Health Care in Public Service Systems (POC) study conducted in San Diego, CA. Youth from this study were selected if they had an active case in at least one of five public systems of care during the last six months of the 1996-1997 fiscal year: (alcohol and drug services (AD), child welfare (CW), juvenile justice (JJ), mental health (MH), or special education services for seriously emotionally disturbed youth (SED). The Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) and Youth Self Report (YSR) (Achenbach, 1991) were chosen as the measures of behavioral problems because they are sound, empirically tested psychometric measures of a broad range of child and adolescent psychopathology and have also been shown to be accurate measures across cultures. Both measures were available in Spanish at the time of data collection. Logistic regression was used to determine if there was an increased likelihood for youth to receive services, based on parental report of problems.

Results: Results showed that youth in public systems of care have high rates of behavior problems regardless of race/ethnicity. There are significant differences in the rates of behavioral problems across race/ethnicity, with more Caucasian youth having borderline scores than any other race. There is also a correlation between parental report of symptoms and youth receiving services. Youth with borderline CBCL scores were more likely to receive multiple types of services than were youth with clinical YSR scores. Patterns of service utilization across sector type vary, thus it is important to obtain parental report of youth functioning levels.

Implications: Utilizing parental report of behavior problems for adolescents in public sectors of care may reveal problems that are not evident when only youth report their symptoms, although this raises the question of whose report is more accurate or clinically significant. Both parental report and youth report are needed to obtain the most accurate picture of behavior problems. Assessment measures that are available in multiple languages should be used due the large population of non-English speaking adults and youth in the United States.

See more of Poster Session I
See more of Oral and Poster

See more of Celebrating a Decade of SSWR (January 13 - 16, 2005)