Development and Validation of the Therapist Barriers to Engaging Parents (TBEP) Measure.

Parent engagement is a well-documented challenge when delivering child and adolescent mental health treatments. Therapists' internal experiences, and how they respond to parents, may create a barrier to the parent engagement process. The current study developed the 13-item Therapist Barriers to Engaging Parents measure (TBEP) to assess providers' internal and external experiences that operate as barriers to parent engagement. The TBEP was completed by 148 child and family therapists across the United States. The TBEP demonstrated strong internal reliability (Cronbach α = .86), and was negatively correlated with counselor efficacy, and significantly positively correlated with burnout, indicating convergent validity. Incremental validity of the subscales of the TBEP was also demonstrated. The TBEP appears to be a psychometrically sound measure of the internal barriers mental health providers experience when trying to engage parents.

Grouping Youth With Similar Symptoms: A Person-Centered Approach to Transdiagnostic Subgroups.

OBJECTIVES: The present study extracted symptom profiles based on parent and youth report on a broad symptom checklist. Profiles based on parent-reported symptoms were compared to those based on adolescent self-report to clarify discrepancies. METHOD: The current study used archival data from 1,269 youth and parent dyads whose youth received services at a community mental health center. The mean age of the sample was 14.31 years (standard deviation = 1.98), and the youth sample was half male (50.1%) and primarily Caucasian (86.8%). Latent profile analysis was used to extract models based on parent and self-reported emotional and behavioral problems. RESULTS: Results indicated that a 5-class solution was the best fitting model for youth-reported symptoms and an adequate fit for parent-reported symptoms. For 46.5% of the sample, class membership matched for both parent and youth. CONCLUSION: Latent profile analysis provides an alternative method for exploring transdiagnostic subgroups within clinic-referred samples.

When Attitudes Become Obstacles: An Exploratory Study of Future Physicians' Concerns about Reporting Child Maltreatment.

BACKGROUND: Child maltreatment (CM) makes up a significant portion of events under the larger umbrella term of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). Therefore, we need to develop a competent healthcare workforce that is prepared to assess and report CM in order to create a comprehensive framework for assessing and addressing ACEs. The objective of the present study was to examine the obstacles to reporting CM among a sample of future physicians. METHODS: Two samples of medical students and residents (N = 196) completed the Healthcare Provider Attitudes Toward Child Maltreatment Reporting Scale and rated how likely they would be to report suspected CM. RESULTS: Medical students were found to have more negative feelings about and perceive more obstacles to reporting CM compared to residents in our sample. Scores on the Reporting Responsibilities subscale were not significantly associated with increased likelihood of reporting CM. However, lower scores on the Concerns about Reporting subscale were related to an increased likelihood of reporting CM. CONCLUSIONS: Future physicians who perceived fewer obstacles to reporting CM reported being more likely to report suspected CM. Misinformed fears about outcomes such as retaliation, removal of the child from the home, and being sued may interfere with future physicians' adherence to mandated reporting responsibilities. Efforts should be made early in physician education to identify and address common myths and misconceptions around mandated reporting and its outcomes.