PARTNERS Clinic: Predictors of positive outcomes for traumatized youth and caregivers
What is our goal? Childhood exposure to abuse and neglect is substantial problem, with national statistics recording approximately three million referrals (6.2 million children) each year (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2011). There are serious psychological consequences for maltreated youth (Silverman et al., 2008), and yet, most do not receive therapies that have been shown to help. Moreover, few researchers have studied the effectiveness of these therapies with ethnically diverse, inner city samples that have multiple barriers to treatment participation.
PARTNERS is a free outpatient clinic for traumatized families. Evaluation is embedded into the program such that we can evaluate the effectiveness of empirically-supported trauma-specific therapies (Trauma-Focused CBT; Alternatives for Families CBT) with underserved, inner-city families. The questions we are trying to answer include:
- How helpful are the therapies in reducing symptoms for children and teens?
- How helpful are the therapies in improving parenting and caregiver stress?
- What factors are related to drop out?
- What factors are related to greater degree of improvement?
How are we gathering our data? PARTNERS Clinic has established contacts at multiple agencies that regularly make referrals for therapy (see Our Partners in Healing). Youth, ages 4-17 who have been through traumatic events and their caregivers are evaluated at the start of, midway through, at the end of therapy, and three months later. To date, approximately 200 families have been evaluated at pre-treatment.
PARTNERS Clinic: Multi-method measurement of emotion regulation in maltreated teenagers Read more.
Next Study Read more.
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