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Discrepancy in reporting is a frequent phenomenon in psychotherapy research and its presence indicates added information to take into account when assessing youth functioning (De Los Reyes, 2011; Hawley & Weisz, 2003). There is a need to further understand patterns in youth psychotherapy to protect from risk of treatment failure or deterioration. Our study aimed to explore informant discrepancy and its relation to key therapeutic constructs as well as youth functionality over time within youth outpatient mental health populations who use the Y-OQ and TSM in routine outcome monitoring and as clinical support measures. Using an outpatient mental health sample, regular Y-OQ and TSM data from n=157 youth ages 12-18 and their primary caregivers was assessed. Informant discrepancy was measured using initial total Y-OQ scores from both the youth and primary caregiver. Therapeutic constructs were measured using the TSM domains of primary caregiver distress, therapeutic alliance, and youth motivation. Change in functioning throughout the course of treatment was measured by the primary caregiver and youth Y-OQ total scores at each session. Results indicated that informant discrepancy predicted primary caregiver distress as well as change in youth functioning over time as perceived by the primary caregiver. Consistent with previous research, higher discrepancy between was associated with higher primary caregiver distress and predicted poorer youth functioning throughout the course of treatment. Implications and conclusions are discussed.

The overarching goal of this dissertation is to inform evidence-based supports for diverse parents. Past meta-analyses (e.g., Dimitrova, Chasiotis, & van de Vijver, 2016; Porter & Haslam, 2005) have examined adjustment in migrant children, adolescents, and adults. To date, reviews have often examined only immigrants or refugees, with few quantitative comparisons between groups. Further, few include information on parenting or parental adjustment (e.g., van Os, Kalverboer, Zijlstra, Post, & Knorth, 2016). To fill this gap, I conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of studies that used psychometrically strong measures of adjustment and parenting with newcomer immigrant and refugee families to update the literature and to provide a quantitative comparison between migrant groups. Database searches yielded 18,139 abstracts for screening; 4,626 full text articles were reviewed; 31 independent samples 25 of which have not been included in previous reviews met inclusion criteria. Results highlight important differences between migrant groups and informants: parent reports of youth adjustment generally reported greater problems among both immigrant and refugee youth compared to normative samples, whereas youth self-reports varied by migrant group (with refugee youth reporting greater problems than immigrant youth) and adjustment construct. In my second study, I developed and evaluated a self-report measure of adherence to an evidence-based parenting program that is used with diverse families. This tool, the Practitioner Session Reflection Tool (PSRT; Sheshko, Lee, & Gagné, 2015), was designed to support practitioners’ adherence to both the session content and to the primary process of self-regulation theorized to underpin the Triple P – Positive Parenting Program (Sanders, 1999, 2012). Fifty-two practitioners from 12 community agencies submitted 361 self-reports; a subset of 23 practitioners submitted 63 audio-recordings to permit additional ratings by a coding team providing a multi-informant and multimethod evaluation of adherence. Results provided preliminary evidence of good levels of reliability and validity for scores on the adherence measures. Consistent with previous research there were low correlations between informants: practitioners reported both higher content (84.6% compared to 49.9%) and process (80.0 – 95.0% compared to 30 – 55%) adherence than that rated by coders. Possible explanations for this discrepancy are discussed. Taken together, the results of these two studies highlight both the importance of offering supports that can be delivered flexibly to suit the needs of diverse families, and the need to support practitioners’ self-reflection on adherence to program content and underlying processes in delivering those supports.

The negative impact of war on child mental health has been repeatedly documented. Still, the majority of children exposed to ethnic and political violence show no signs of clinical disorder. In Western countries of exile, these findings have prompted a variety of attempts to evaluate refugee children, in the hope of identifying and offering support to those children “at risk”. This study critically examines one such attempt. The aims are fourfold: 1. to describe the range and pattern of child trauma-stress exposure and mental health reactions as captured on clinician semi-structured interview; 2. to critically compare clinician assessment with independent parent, child and teacher reports; 3. to identify factors of potential risk or protective import for child mental health; 4. to draw clinical implications: from whom and by what means can children at risk be reasonably identified? The target of our study was the entire population of Bosnian-Serbian-Croatian speaking child refugee families assigned to Umeå and surrounding municipalities during 1994-95. Fifty families, containing 90 children aged one month to 20 years, were included in the study. Assessment occurred in two phases. First, a semi-structured interview was conducted that inquired broadly as to the child’s family background, trauma-stress exposure, emotional-behavioral problems, patterns of family functioning, and future hopes. Second, standardized self-report questionnaires were administered, separately to parent and child, to provide alternative appraisal of the child’s war exposure, mental health symptoms, coping strategies, and social network. Teacher evaluation of child cognitive-social functioning as well as emotional-behavioral problems was also obtained. Clinician semi-structured interview revealed the child’s pre-war period as preponderantly good, and provided richly detailed narratives of child exposure during war and resettlement that clustered into a limited number of type-stories. Independent parent assessment captured the same broad strokes of child war exposure; but both approaches – fixed questionnaire and semi-structured interview – showed specific areas of blindness. Teenage self-report offered a disparate but equally rich account of war exposure, while that of primary school child was significantly less detailed. Nearly half of the study children (48%) were identified on clinician interview with one or more mental health problem “demanding further attention”. Depressiveness was the single most prevalent symptom (31%), followed by posttraumatic reactions (23%) and anxiety-regressiveness (15%). Independent symptom appraisal by parent and primary school child was largely concordant with that of clinician, while teenagers made similar assessment as to who was in distress, but defined the nature of that distress differently. Teacher report stood apart, identifying fewer inward emotional problems and asserting the cognitive-social competence of the vast majority of study children. Trauma-stress exposure during both war and resettlement presented as an unequivocal risk to mental health, but accounted for only part of outcome variance. Additional factors of strong import related broadly to “living in the present”. Parent impairment of daily routines, child dissatisfaction with school and an ongoing quarrelsome relationship presented as risk factors. Protection was associated with parent maintenance of a warm family climate and of concrete physical-emotional caring, child social ties to physically present others, including teacher; and above all, a family sense of hope for the future. Results support the general robustness of our semi-structured approach. Exploring the child’s present well-being in narrative relation to past and future, our assessment captured and gave meaning to the complexity of child exposure and behavior. At the same time, independent parent and child appraisals provided an additional richness to the retelling and evaluation of child experience. Particularly the apartness of teacher report underscores the need to incorporate an outside-world vantage point in the process of risk assessment.

We are concerned with addressing the worst-case distributed source coding (DSC) problem in asymmetric and interactive communication scenarios and its application to data-gathering wireless sensor networks in enhancing their lifetime. First, we propose a unified canonical framework, obtained by considering different communication constraints and objectives, to address the variants of DSC problem. Second, as for the worst-case information-theoretic analysis, the notion of information entropy cannot be used, we propose information ambiguity, derive its various properties, and prove that it is a valid information measure. Third, for a few variants of our interest of DSC problem, we provide the communication protocols and prove their optimality. In a typical data-gathering sensor network, the base-station that wants to gather sensor data is often assumed to be much more resourceful with respect to energy, computation, and communication capabilities compared to sensor nodes. Therefore, we argue that in such networks, the base-station should bear the most of the burden of communication and computation in the network. Allowing the base-station and sensor nodes to interactively communicate with each other enables us to carry this out. Our definition of sensor network lifetime allows us to reduce the problem of maximizing the worst-case network lifetime to the problem of minimizing the number of bits communicated by the nodes in the worst-case, which is further reduced to the worst-case DSC problem in asymmetric and interactive communication scenarios, with the assumption that the base-station knows the support-set of sensor data. We demonstrate that the optimal solutions of the energy-oblivious DSC problem variants cannot be directly applied to the data-gathering sensor networks, as those may be inefficient in the energy-constrained sensor networks. We address a few energy-efficient variants of DSC problem and provide optimal communication protocols for the sensor networks, based on those variants. Finally, we combine distributed source coding with two other system level opportunities of channel coding and cooperative nature of the nodes to further enhance the lifetime of the sensor networks. We address various scenarios and demonstrate the dependence of the computational complexity of the network lifetime maximization problem on the complex interplay of above system-level opportunities.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-03-15T19:40:15Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Adriana de Fatima Ribeiro.pdf: 1024780 bytes, checksum: d13e14bac4328d6e7a146f7ac32bb833 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-02-13 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / Attention Deficit Disorder and Hyperactivity (ADHD) is characterized by a pattern of persistent inattention and/ or hyperactivity that it is more severe than normally observed in individuals with an equivalent level of development. It is a disorder in which the symptoms are varied and may interfere in different degrees according to the environment in which the individual is inserted. The identification of the signs of this disorder must take into consideration an assessment of the neuropsychological functions and of the behavioral indicators, preferably from multiple informants such as parents or guardians, teachers and the adolescent itself. This project aims to identify the main agreements relating to the behaviors of adolescents complaining of symptoms of ADHD observed by multiple informants, and correlate them to their performance on neuropsychological tests. It was used the inventories CBCL/6-18, TRF/6-18 and YSR/11-18 belonging to the Achenbach System of Empirically Based Assessment (ASEBA) and WISC-III, Wisconsin and the Concentrated Attention Test (AC). Twenty adolescents participated in this study aged between 11 and 16 years, divided into two groups, ten with diagnostic (ADHD group) and ten without ADHD (control group). All participants were part of the protocol of neuropsychological, behavioral and clinical assessment to identify signs of inattention and hyperactivity/ impulsivity of the Developmental Disorders Post-Graduation Program at Mackenzie Presbyterian University. The results for the concordance rates in the answers provided by multiple informants in the correlation between CBCL versus TRF, CBCL versus YSR and TRF versus YSR, through values of reference (Q corr), according to the ADM program version 7, were high for both groups. In the comparison of the scales of Internalizing, Externalizing and Total Problems in function of the groups and instruments, as much as for the scales of problems of attention and attention deficit disorder and hyperactivity, it was observed in the ADHD group that the parents reported more problems than the teachers and in the control group the teachers reported significantly greater number of problems. In the comparison of the scales of Sluggish Cognitive Tempo in function of the groups and instruments it was verified that the parents also perceive more alterations in the behavior in different instruments constituents of this scale than the teachers. Regarding to correlations of neuropsychological tests and behavioral indicators of problems of behavior in different instruments, no significant differences were observed. It is therefore concluded the need to compose procedures of assessment of people with the complaint of ADHD with different reporting instruments by multiple informants, besides other procedures such as direct observation or neuropsychological testing for the establishment of a cognitive profile as an aid in the process of assessment. / O Transtorno de Déficit de Atenção/Hiperatividade (TDAH) se caracteriza por um padrão de desatenção e/ou hiperatividade persistente e mais grave do que o normalmente observado em indivíduos com nível equivalente de desenvolvimento. Trata-se de um transtorno cujos sintomas são variados e podem interferir em graus diversos conforme o ambiente no qual o indivíduo está inserido. A identificação dos sinais desse transtorno deve levar em consideração uma avaliação das funções neuropsicológicas e de indicadores comportamentais, preferencialmente a partir de múltiplos informantes como pais ou responsáveis, professores e o próprio adolescente. Este projeto tem como objetivo identificar as principais concordâncias referentes aos comportamentos dos adolescentes com queixa dos sintomas de TDAH, observados pelos múltiplos informantes e posteriormente correlacioná-los ao seu desempenho nos testes neuropsicológicos. Foram usados os inventários CBCL/6-18, TRF/6-18 e YSR/11-18 que pertencem ao Sistema de Avaliação Baseado em Evidência do Achenbach (ASEBA) e WISC-III, Wisconsin e Teste de Atenção Concentrada (AC). Participaram desse estudo 20 adolescentes com idades entre 11 a 16 anos, divididos em dois grupos, 10 com diagnóstico (grupo TDAH) e 10 sem TDAH (grupo controle).Todos os participantes fizeram parte do protocolo de avaliação neuropsicológica, comportamental e clínica para identificar sinais de desatenção e hiperatividade/impulsividade do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Distúrbios do Desenvolvimento, da Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie. Os resultados para os índices de concordância nas respostas fornecidas pelos múltiplos informantes na correlação entre CBCL versus TRF, CBCL versus YSR e TRF versus YSR, pelo meio dos valores de referência (Q corr), de acordo com o programa ADM versão 7, mostrou-se alta para os dois grupos. Na comparação das escalas de Problemas Internalizantes, Externalizantes e Totais em função dos grupos e instrumentos tanto quanto para as escalas de Problemas de atenção e Problemas de déficit de atenção e hiperatividade, observou-se no grupo TDAH que os pais relataram mais problemas que os professores e no grupo controle os professores é quem relataram um número significativamente maior de problemas. Na comparação das escalas de Ritmo Cognitivo Lento em função dos grupos e instrumentos, verificou-se que os pais também perceberam mais alterações nos comportamentos constituintes dessa escala que os professores. Com relação às correlações dos testes neuropsicológicos e dos indicadores comportamentais de problemas de comportamento nos diferentes instrumentos, não foram observadas diferenças significativas. Conclui-se, assim, a necessidade de compor procedimentos de avalição de pessoas com queixas de TDAH com diferentes instrumentos de relato por múltiplos informantes, além de outros procedimentos como observação direta ou testagem neuropsicológica para o estabelecimento de um perfil cognitivo para auxiliar no processo de avaliação.