This thesis draws on the 2014 Ontario Child Health Study (2014 OCHS) to
address four contemporary and policy-relevant issues associated with measuring
child and adolescent mental health need and children’s mental health service use in
the general population. The first and second papers focus on the development and
evaluation of instruments to measure child mental disorder. The first paper develops
a simple, brief symptom checklist used to measure child mental disorder
conceptualized as a dimensional phenomenon, a core concept in the 2014 OCHS.
The second focuses on a briefer version of this checklist to measure child mental
disorder dimensionally in general and clinical populations for the purposes of
assessing and monitoring children’s mental health need. The third and fourth papers
use these measures as the basis for assessing children’s mental health need in
evaluations of policy-relevant health service questions. The third paper focuses on a
substantive question about area-level variation in children’s unmet need for mental
health services using 2014 OCHS data linked to government administrative data
and 2016 Census data. The fourth paper estimates the extent to which child mental
health service expenditures in 2014-15 were allocated according to children’s
mental health need. Together, these papers respond to the need for simple, brief,
self-report measures of child and adolescent mental disorders and show how these
types of measures, in combination with administrative government data sources can
advance our knowledge about policy and funding decisions in children’s mental
health services research in Ontario. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / The goals of this thesis are to address issues relating to: (1) measuring child
and adolescent mental health need using brief, self-report problem checklists and
(2) using these measures to answer questions about children’s mental health service
use and service expenditures in the general population in Ontario. The individual
manuscripts in this thesis respond to the need for simple, brief, self-report measures
of child and adolescent mental disorders and advance our knowledge about policy
and funding decisions in children’s mental health services research in Ontario.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/25132 |
| Date | January 2020 |
| Creators | Duncan, Laura |
| Contributors | Boyle, Michael, Health Research Methodology |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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