Contrasting the Treatment-Related Perceptions of Parents and Their Children: Using Data from Child and Adolescent Brief Mental Health Services Recipients in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: Discrepancies between parental and child perceptions of problems and their therapeutic expectations can negatively impact mental health treatment efficacy. Aims: We sought to explore concordance and discrepancy in families receiving brief, client-centered, and strengths-based mental health services, specifically by contrasting parents’ and children’s perceptions of the child’s presenting issues; treatment expectations; and levels of concern pre- and post-treatment. We also examined the psychometric properties of a therapeutic scaling question on the level of concern, by examining associations with scores from the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. Methods: Using a mixed-methods approach, we examined data from openand closed-ended questions, some used as part of the treatment. This included brief descriptions of perceived presenting issues and treatment expectations, and levels of concern on a scale of 1 to 10. Results: Parent and child descriptions of issues were judged generally congruent 66% of the time. Respectively, minor and major non-congruence was observed 25% and 9% of the time. In terms of treatment expectations, parents were more likely to express a desire to understand the issues and improve communication in the family. Children were more likely to express no expectancies or respond with simple statements (e.g., feel better). Parents initially rated their children’s problems as more severe than did their children. We found that the scaling question demonstrated a modest association with the level of concern from the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ). Conclusions: Even though most parents and their children broadly agree on presenting mental health issues for which they seek counseling, important differences manifest in how they perceive them and what they want accomplished during sessions. Practitioners need to consider, assess, and accommodate such discrepancies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".