A one-group pre-test post-test design (including 6- and 12-month follow-up), supplemented with benchmarking analyses, was employed to assess the effectiveness of Multisystemic Therapy (MST) for youth displaying antisocial behaviours in New Zealand. An additional aim of the current study was to assess for predictors and moderators of outcome. The predictor variables assessed included: Client satisfaction, therapeutic and supervisory alliance, therapist and supervisor adherence, therapist and supervisor allegiance, and therapist and supervisor accountability. Seventy-three youth and their families completed the MST program (M = 162 days) and the present study’s measures. Youth and their families experienced improvements in ultimate outcomes (offending frequency, offending seriousness, and days in out-of-home placements) and instrumental outcomes (youth positive and negative behaviour, parent well-being and psychopathology, parent ability, and family functioning) following MST treatment. With a few exceptions, these gains were largely maintained up to 12 months following treatment. Benchmarking analyses indicated that the completion rate and effect sizes were comparable with those from previous MST studies both in New Zealand and the United States. The predictor variables of service satisfaction, therapeutic alliance, and therapist adherence predicted higher levels of change in most instrumental outcomes as expected. However, of significant importance, higher supervisor adherence and supervisory alliances were associated with significantly lower therapist adherence, therapeutic alliance, and some client outcomes. Furthermore, the few significant interactions between predictor variables produced mixed findings, many of which contradicted widely held assumptions. As MST has been demonstrated to be an effective treatment for youth offenders in New Zealand, continuing dissemination and ongoing evaluation of MST in New Zealand is recommended. In particular, given the negative impact of supervision variables on therapist adherence, therapeutic alliance, and some client outcomes, this would include research aimed at assessing various quality control functions of supervision, including supervisor training, mechanisms of supervision related to therapist and client variables, and the potential value of more closely monitoring the process of supervision.

This document is a review of literature on needs assessments and the benefits of conducting one. Communicare is a mental health agency that serves the Lincoln Trail Region. Currently, most of the revenue from their children programs comes from Medicaid, which is a fee-for-services payer source. The Kentucky Medicaid Program is in the process of contracting with managed care organizations to oversee services that have been paid directly from Kentucky Medicaid. With these changes, mental health organizations must identify specific community service needs as well as expanding revenue sources. Applying for grants is one way mental health agencies can expand revenue sources. Communicare has identified the KY SEED grant that focuses on prevention and providing services to early childhood programs as a potential funding source. A needs assessment was conducted to gather information on children services implemented by Communicare. It was conducted in order to assess current programs and seek out potential areas of future program growth. The needs assessment further sought to identify gaps in services for the early childhood programs and assist in the grant application process. A review of existing data on children’s services offered at Communicare, including a satisfaction survey and a System of Care Assessment Report, was conducted as part of the needs assessment. A Community Forum with community partners from the Lincoln Trail region was held to gather additional data for the needs assessment.

This study applies qualitative methodology to the study of sociopolitical development (SPD) among community and labor organizers of color. Participant data (open-ended applications) were obtained from a long-standing training institution, span 18 years (n=200), and equally represent Black, Latino/a, and Asian individuals. This study sought to reveal important dimensions of SPD and to identify contributing life experiences. Three SPD themes emerged: (1) social analysis, (2) commitment, and (3) empowerment. An organizer thus exhibits multidimensional insight into social injustice, commitment to taking action, and genuine belief in his/her individual and collective abilities. Four experiential domains contributed to participants’ SPD: (a) family, (b) social identity, (c) social injustice and (d) sociopolitical work. Each theme and domain is described in a multidimensional way. The relationships between life experiences and SPD themes are furthermore examined, and located within existing psychological research. Finally, implications of these findings for practitioners are discussed.

Although sport fandom is often stereotypically associated with negative behaviors such as poor interpersonal skills and aggressiveness, theorists have suggested that, because sport fandom provides such a social and fun atmosphere, fandom may actually be related to psychological health. ... Research for the current study looked to expand prior research as the correlation between Team Identification and several factors, including psychological well-being, collective self-esteem, and community identification. ....

Despite the federal government’s $1.5 billion investment between 1993 and 2010 to fund 164 separate community-based systems of care, there has been an extremely limited attempt to measure the impact of system of care. The impetus for this research is the struggle for how the value based concept of system of care is communicated within a community. While child mental health services researchers have published a number of randomized control trials to explore individual level supports for youth served in a system of care community, researchers have struggled to devise a way to measure system of care philosophy diffusion. While system of care is a system level intervention, this study explored the role of the system of care value: family voice as it pertains to direct practice for children and families. The goal was to assess whether specific direct practices regularly associated with system of care (i.e., wraparound or home-based services) lead to greater family voice or if the mere presence of a high-functioning system of care community leads to equal family voice for all receiving community-based services. The primary finding was a relationship between the perception of family functioning and perceived empowerment/self-efficacy. This finding suggests that as functioning improves, so does a caregiver’s perception of their personal empowerment/ self-efficacy. While the framing of this study was to “unpack” the system of care value of family voice, the findings do not support any clear cut explanation for how family voice is promoted or communicated to families. Based on the findings, it appears as if families feel more empowered as their child improves. Additional research needs to be done on the application of family voice within the practice setting to better understand how to best instruct staff to infuse family voice in their daily practice.

The goal of this study was to explore factors that lead to engagement in the community affected by HIV and AIDS (CAHA). An additional goal of this study was to better understand the relationships between psychological sense of community (PSOC) and social identification (SI), and their connections to two classes of motivations: community concern motivations (CCM) and esteem enhancement motivations (EEM). These constructs predicted two types of engagement in CAHA: AIDS activism and intentions for future participation in community related activity. Analyses were conducted on existing data (Omoto, 2005). The results indicate that PSOC and SI should be considered as independent constructs that uniquely explain community engagement. CCM were found to mediate these relationships, potentially explaining their links.

While traditional behavioural parent training programmes have assisted families with concerns of child behaviour problems, they have not kept abreast with recent conceptualisations of the development of problematic behaviours in the parent-child relationship. Research has indicated that understanding of this relationship needs to go beyond bidirectional explanations and that a dialectical framework better describes the complexity of this relationship, which, in turn, should be reflected in the parent training programmes offered. Therefore, this study provided a parent training programme focused on balance in the parent-child relationship, which encapsulated the complex, dialectical nature of this intimate relationship. A central implication when adopting this notion of balance was that all aspects of the programme were addressed at the parent and child level. In addition, multiple factors were addressed that included mindfulness and acceptance, dealing with emotions, understanding development, and addressing parental attributions. It was only within this overarching concept of balance and relationship factors that behavioural skills were introduced. Mechanisms of change were identified by investigating parental emotional schemas through their narratives about themselves, their child, and the programme. This research involved 23 parents with their 3-4 year-old children in a parent training programme where both the parent and child met weekly with a therapist in group parent training. The groups involved 2-hourly sessions for 5 weeks, modelled on a “coffee morning” where parents met and discussed issues and the children played alongside in the same room. A research assistant was available to play with and tend to basic needs of the children. Measures at pre-, post-treatment, and at follow-up targeted child behaviour problems, how much of a problem these were for the parents, parents’ sense of competence, parental attributions, and what was useful for parents in the programme. Results indicated that at post-treatment parents were able to address and maintain balance in their parent-child relationship and this reflected multiple dimensions of a dialectical understanding that had not been evident prior to the intervention. There was an increased mindfulness of both parent and child’s needs with a strong emphasis on an increased understanding of the child as an individual in their own right. Parents reported an increased recognition of the importance of dealing with emotions, with improved skills to be able to do this, an increased understanding of accommodating development, and an appreciation of needing to address parental attributions. In addition, there was a decrease in parent-reported intensity of child behaviour problems and how problematic these were for the parents, which were corroborated with parental verbal reports of improved child behaviour. Mechanisms of change that were identified included changes in parental attributions, parents being able to share with other parents, accessing “expert” knowledge from the programme facilitator, and gaining parental strategies. Implications for practice were discussed with suggestions for behavioural parent training programmes. In conclusion, limitations of the research and directions for future research were indicated.

Low-skilled, low socio-economic status, young, co-resident, working fathers: Their experience of fatherhood Using open-ended interview techniques, 23 low-skilled, low socio-economic status fathers aged 20-29 were interviewed about their experience of fatherhood. All participants were in unskilled jobs and all lived with and supported their partners and child/children. This population of fathers is generally overlooked by researchers. Because they take responsibility for some of society’s most vulnerable families and children, understanding how they conceive of their role as fathers can promote the welfare of those families and children. Participants were recruited by casual connections, snowballing and advertisement. The interviews explored the participants' experience of fatherhood and their reasons for being active and committed family members. Focus was given to how they made sense of fatherhood in terms of their life course. Participants had two interviews, the first generic and the second idiographic. Interviews were tape-recorded and later transcribed. A social constructionist approach was used: transcripts were analysed by identifying and examining the primary domains in which participants experienced fatherhood. Participants spoke of fatherhood as an affective activity, the primary object of good fatherhood being to maintain an emotional bond with one’s children. Being a good father was thought to involve eschewing deleterious family practices such as those which had marred their own childhoods. In this regard, participants saw themselves as repairing their family-of-origin's dysfunctional style. Providing was described as a core feature of fatherhood – subsidiary to, but corollary on, being an emotionally-engaged father. Good fathers were described as committed providers, albeit participants did not consider their own limited earning capacity to compromise their fatherhood. Obtaining a job and providing for one’s family was one of the ‘pro-socializing’ effects of fatherhood. Participants considered fatherhood to not only improve but to also redeem their lives, giving a purpose and focus they had lacked prior to their becoming parents. Being a good father also involved being a good partner. For many of the participants, this involved adopting non-gendered roles in the home. The sharing of housework and childcare improved home life by reducing the partner's workload. Those who failed to adopt the gender-neutral stance acknowledged this as a personal shortcoming that they planned to remedy. Fatherhood for these 23 interviewees was one of the few means by which they could obtain social value and status as adults. They lacked access to financial resources, education or supportive family connections, but fatherhood was a domain in which they could present themselves as significant members of society. It also provided a network of emotional relationships which promoted their sense of self-worth and their social and emotional wellbeing.

This research contributes new knowledge to those working in the areas of welfare, child and adolescent safety, and suicide prevention. The aim of this thesis was to succinctly provide clinicians, government and community agencies, researchers and policy advisors, with a snapshot profile of 2029 welfare seeking young people who were homeless and frequently discouraged by negative life events. The research aim was to identify risk and protective factors that impact life outcomes for those seeking the Independent Youth Benefit (IYB), and particularly, to scrutinize salient factors that led a vulnerable group of IYB applicants to die by suicide. It was further aimed that by documenting comments from 200 young adults from this population across a span of seven years, both gaps within the IYB process, as well as useful resources, could be identified in order to improve life outcomes for other homeless youth. For those who attempted suicide and survived, file records and interviews have indicated the triggers and life histories that potentially impacted their decision to try to end their pain of life, and factors that influenced survival and recovery. Four separate studies were included in this thesis. Study 1 profiled 2029 IYB applicants and determined the most potent risks that led to the granting of the IYB. Study 2 revealed the salient factors that related to the suicide of 6 IYB applicants. Study 3 investigated the outcomes for those who were granted or declined a benefit across the variables of education, employment, income, adverse life circumstances, wellbeing, and family relationships. Study 4 examined a psychological construct, termed cynical distrust, which appeared to be a characteristic trait in welfare seeking youth. Conclusions from this research provided indicators of youth who will usually be granted an IYB, they are, those who report bullying, abuse, parent psychopathology, single parent homes, a parent on a benefit and foster placement. Applicants who reported suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts and had contact with Police and Child Youth and Family Services also were more likely to be granted an Independent Youth Benefit (IYB). If the applicants were Maori and had previously seen a counsellor for a mental health problem, they also were more likely to receive the IYB. However, when applicants were referred to Family Reconciliation Counselling (FRC), there was a statistically significant association between benefit application and benefit declined. A unique finding from this population related to the association of 'unknown fathers' with suicide. Absent father literature is now extensive, however, little research has been conducted into the effects of 'unknown fathers', particularly for Maori youth who place much of their strength and wellbeing in their genealogy. Other salient factors leading to suicide for IYB applicants included, previous suicide attempt, co-morbid disorder, unresolved anger, no identified caring adult, foster placement and an impending legal or disciplinary event. Maori males with such factors posed the greatest risk for suicide. Counsellors, psychologists, families and policy analysts need to acknowledge that IYB applicants who attempted suicide, show cynical distrust, and were declined a benefit, had extremely poor life outcomes. The New Zealand youth welfare system could be functioning far more efficiently if documented recommendations become realities.

The shift to community care through the deinstitutionalisation movement in New Zealand has been criticised for producing fragmented and uncoordinated service provision for those with mental illness in the community. As a result, the police are coming into increased contact with the mentally ill, often in times of crisis, positioning police at the junction between mental health services and the criminal justice system. Barriers to access for integrative, comprehensive mental health care in the community have led to police understanding their position as the ‘ambulance at the bottom of the cliff’. While previous research has attended to police officer attitudes and points of interaction with those with mental illness in the community, little has been said regarding understandings of the collaborative relationships from the vantage point of those officers policing the mentally ill. The current research sought to address this gap in the literature by exploring how police make sense of their experiences with those with mental illness in the community using a Foucaultian form of discourse analysis. The discourses that co-articulated and produced understandings of the position(s) of police in community service provision for the mentally ill and the power relationships between the police, the mental health system and the mentally ill can be understood through ‘links in the chain’; ‘the (un) identifiable other’; ‘no-man’s land’; ‘underdogs’; and ‘the cure’. These systems of meaning making from the police vantage point reproduced and re-institutionalised constructions of the mentally ill as ‘criminal’ or ‘disordered’, necessitating mechanisms of power and control to address the ‘risk’ mental illness posed to the community. Through such understandings the police, as society’s institutional response to ‘threat’, necessarily occupy the position of the ‘ambulance at the bottom of the cliff’ at the institutional boundaries between disorder and criminality. And it is here that the institutional response to mental illness re-emerges as re-institutionalisation.