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Multiple assessors of child welfare youths' mental‐health functioning: comparing perceptions of adolescents, caregivers and teachers
Author(s) -
Simmel Cassandra,
Lee Inseon,
Kim Soyoun,
Miles Jonathan
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
child and family social work
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.912
H-Index - 57
eISSN - 1365-2206
pISSN - 1356-7500
DOI - 10.1111/cfs.12024
Subject(s) - welfare , mental health , perception , psychology , odds , logistic regression , developmental psychology , matching (statistics) , clinical psychology , psychopathology , psychiatry , medicine , political science , neuroscience , law , pathology
For youth involved with the child welfare system, accurate assessment of mental‐health functioning is a critical factor in case planning. To assess correspondence among multiple reporters of child welfare youths' mental‐health difficulties, this study, using data drawn from the N ational S urvey of C hild and A dolescent W ell‐being dataset, examined the caregiver, teacher and youth (aged 11–16 years) reports on the C hild B ehavior C hecklist ( n = 464). Perceptions about symptomatology on a variety of externalizing and internalizing behaviour problem scales were measured with a correlation analysis. Subsequently, logistic regression models were created, which explored how each reporter category matched a fourth reporter category: the child welfare investigation caseworkers' identification of youths' mental‐health needs. Results show that in several models, the odds of matching caseworkers' determination of youths' mental‐health needs significantly increased as youths' perceptions of psychopathology increased. A similar pattern was found for caregivers' perceptions in some of the models, across both internalizing and externalizing domains. Implications for child welfare practice and research with child welfare youth are discussed.