The applicant is requesting five years of funding through the Mentored Career Development Award (K01) program to develop her skills for research on cross-culturally responsive mental health services for children and adolescents, and specifically, to examine school and parent factors in the service entry pathway that may result in differential racial/ethnic representation in school-based and traditional mental health services. The ultimate goal is to have the expertise to offer empirically supported recommendations on ways to promote appropriate service use and to apply such knowledge to large scale studies for systems that seek to be cross- culturally responsive. The applicant's strong background of academic and research training outpatient mental health services, ethnic minority mental health issues (with an expertise on Asian American populations), multiple parties in child service use, child psychopathology, and multiple sectors of care provides an excellent foundation for this work. The proposed training goals, including obtaining greater knowledge of schools and school-based mental health services, increasing knowledge of diverse populations, and developing longitudinal data analysis skills, will allow the applicant to pursue multi-sector, multi-cultural, longitudinal research on issues dealing with systemic cross-cultural competence with children. The research plan for this award utilizes the training activities to examine the pathways of youth with emotional/behavioral problems into school- based/mental health services. Two hundred youth (stratified by four racial/ethnic groups) who have emotional/behavioral problems will be identified, and parallel school and parent data will be collected at each of three proposed junctures in the service entry pathway: Judgement of an Emotion/Behavior (E/B) as Problematic, Interpretation of an E/B as Mental Health-Related, and Service Seeking/Referral. Racial/ethnic differences at the three junctures, relationships between the junctures and eventual service entry, and racial/ethnic differences in service entry pathway models will be examined. The data collected will form the basis for a future R01 research project to develop and test the effectiveness of strategies designed to improve appropriate service entry by youth in need.
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