(provided by candidate): The majority of youth in need of mental health interventions do not receive any services (Kataoka et al., 2002). This problem is particularly notable among low socioeconomic (SES) and ethnic minority youth, who are most likely to experience mental health problems, least likely to receive services, and are consequently more likely to suffer the deleterious effects of mental health problems (US DHHS, 2001). School-based prevention and intervention programs represent one of the most promising opportunities for reducing identified service gaps and disparities among youth because of the nearly universal nature of primary and secondary education. As the most common point of entry into a fragmented mental health system, efforts to improve school-based services and understand their implications for future care carry profound implications for overall public health (Farmer et al., 2003). The current application is designed to provide training in the skills necessary to build a long-term program of research investigating the role of school-based programs in addressing the unmet mental health needs of diverse groups of youth. My overarching goal is to move toward an independent research career in which I will apply sophisticated research methodologies to the study and remediation of mental health gaps and disparities and apply the findings to the development of a service delivery model. To accomplish these goals, I will engage in an intensive training experience that will combine individual mentorship, coursework, and field experiences. This training will inform and shape the analyses of a set of research questions pertaining to mental health service utilization and form the basis for a Career Development grant application. The primary research component of this project will take advantage of a rich, existing data set from a school-based prevention program for adolescent depression, the High School Transition Study (HSTS;McCauley et al., 2008), to conduct analyses beyond the scope of the original study. The proposed project will allow me to build expertise in the analysis of school-related factors that influence program effectiveness and to gain knowledge about the assessment of program impact on mental health service utilization across service sectors (e.g., specialty mental health, primary care, education). Results will provide information about how school-based interventions fit into the overall service delivery system, and their potential for reducing disparities in access to services and youth outcomes. My specific research aims include using the ethnically and socioeconomically diverse HSTS sample to explore how students'school attachment and support mediate intervention outcome and to examine the impact of HSTS program participation on the mental health service utilization of different groups of youth.
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