CULTURALLY COMPETENT MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES FOR CHILDREN

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In the field of mental health services research of children,, threw is growing concern that mental health professionals are not meeting the needs of ethic minorities and are unaware of culturally determined behavior. To foster culturally competent mental health services, the purpose of this small grant proposal is to complete the development of an empirically- based measure that assesses therapists' cultural competence when providing services to African American children presenting serious mental health problems and their families. Importantly, this study takes advantage of therapy process and treatment outcome data collected during two recent randomized trials funded by NIMH and NIDA, and developmental support from a Research Infra Structure Program. Therefore, the proposal aims to gain the resources to conduct the data analyses needed to complete the development of a measure of cultural competence with African American children and families and to validate the measure by examining whether constructs tapped by the measured are linked with child and family outcomes. The two aims of the proposed study are to: (1) Develop a measure of culturally competent psychotherapy process that captures the dynamics of client-therapist interactions during therapy sessions from the perspectives of both African American clients and their therapists, and (2) Examine whether constructs from the measure of culturally competent psychotherapy process predict clinical outcome for two samples of African American juvenile offenders previous serious clinical problems and their families.