Helping Children Access and Use Services: A Review

High rates of dropping out from mental health services are documented for children and their families. These high rates exist at different treatment stages, in different service settings, and for different populations of children and families. Some researchers have developed and tested engagement interventions to address barriers to service access and use and increase participation in services by children and their families. Studies of engagement interventions for children and their families are critically reviewed in this paper. Overall, the engagement interventions were effective in increasing attendance at first appointments. Only those with an ecological and total service delivery approach reduced the drop-out rate. However, even then, the drop-out rate was 26% to 29%. Suggestions for future research are made, including ascertaining from children and families their reasons for quitting or staying in treatment, comparing the outcomes of drop-outs with the outcomes of those who remain in treatment, developing and testing conceptual models of engagement for subgroups of at-risk children and their families, and examining the cost-effectiveness of engagement interventions.     

Psychometric Properties and Norms of the Family Needs Scale

We studied 205 low-income families, using the Family Needs Scale (FNS). Factor analysis of the FNS data resulted on a 7-factor solution with high internal consistency within the various subscales. We provide normative scores based on the factor structure of the FNS. A total of 53 parents completed the FNS on two occasions with an average of four weeks between these two ratings. In general, the test-retest reliabilities were low to moderate. A total of 61 pairs of parents independently rated their families with the FNS. Again, agreement between raters was low to moderate. Several factors that may have detracted from better test-retest and interrater reliability were identified. Our data point to the need for more psychometric studies with the FNS.     

Justice as a basic human need

A stark encounter with some of the hostages and their families at the time of a parliamentary coup brought to mind the significance of justice for human development and community discourse. The evidence is presented, the concept of justice explored, human needs defined, and the argument advanced for more psychologists to extend their present academic and professional concerns with aspects of civil and criminal justice to include a concern with the social. The suggestion is that together all three components of justice are sufficiently compelling a component of human welfare to feature in any list of basic needs. Epistemologically they could also be construed as presenting a combined orthogonal domain to be integrated with moral values and be recognised as a stream of the emerging scientist-practitioner-metaphysician model. In raising the topic, attention is paid to the contributions of constitutional and international lawyers, moral philosophers, and a few pioneer psychologists. The hope is that others in such realms as child development, forensic services, industrial/organisational psychology, pastoral psychology, political psychology, and social psychology, might be sufficiently inspired to consider its relevance, undertake requisite training, and redesign their research accordingly.     

心理学在社会服务体系中作用的思考——以复原力建设为例

在社会心理服务体系建设中, 心理学到底起着什么样的作用?怎样才能更好地构建全面系统的多主体社会心理服务体系?在社会心理服务体系建设中如何推动心理学自身的发展?这些问题一直受到广大心理学者的关注。以复原力为例, 通过对个体、团队以及社区心理复原力建设路径的理论总结, 加上实践案例, 以期为社会心理服务体系建设提供知识借鉴与参考, 并反思心理学在此过程中的作用与角色。心理学专业研究团队可以通过整合其在社会支持体系中的应用, 推动心理学在社会服务体系中的应用。     

Long Term Outcomes to Family Caregiver Empowerment

The Vanderbilt Caregiver Empowerment Project evaluated a training program designed to enhance empowerment of caregiver and their subsequent involvement in the mental health treatment of their children. The intervention utilized a multi-component parent training curriculum that was designed to enhance: (a) knowledge of the service system; (b) skills needed to interact with the mental health system; and (c) the caregiver' s mental health services self-efficacy designed to improve caregivers beliefs in their ability to collaborate with service providers. The resulting increased empowerment was hypothesized to increase caretaker involvement, which should affect service use and ultimately the mental health status of the child. A randomized design was used to test the effectiveness of this model with caregivers of children receiving mental health services. The results one-year after the training replicated the intermediate outcomes of the project conducted 3-months after the training. The initial training continued to significantly influence the parent's knowledge and mental health services self-efficacy. However, the intervention had no effect on caregiver involvement in treatment, service use or the mental health status of the children.     

Dynamic interpersonal therapy in an NHS tertiary level specialist psychotherapy service

We describe the introduction of dynamic interpersonal psychotherapy (DIT) into an National Health Service (NHS) tertiary psychoanalytic specialist psychotherapy service. Training in DIT began as our contribution to Improving Access to Psychological Therapies and primary care services, supporting the training and supervision of their DIT practitioners. We then discovered DIT could be a valuable treatment within our own tertiary NHS service for patients with complex presentations. Currently fighting for survival, like many NHS psychoanalytic psychotherapy services nationally, we have adopted a manual-guided, psychoanalytically based therapy to broaden our tertiary clinical psychoanalytic service and accommodate trends in mental health service provision, whilst protecting the quality and integrity of our psychotherapy. DIT helped us continue providing relevant and beneficial psychoanalytic and psychodynamic services to individual patients despite limitations of the financially challenged NHS, NICE guidelines and Payment by Results. We outline the progress and outcomes for patients with complex mental health presentations, include individual case discussion and our experience of using the DIT approach within a traditionally longer term psychoanalytic psychotherapy service.     

青少年外向/宜人性人格、互联网服务偏好与"网络成瘾"的关系

该研究采用问卷法,以481名中学生为被试,通过无约束结构方程模型分析方法探讨了外向性、宜人性人格特征与互联网服务偏好的交互作用对网络成瘾的影响。研究发现在对网络成瘾的影响上,青少年宜人性人格特征与互联网社交服务偏好存在显著的交互作用,但与互联网娱乐、信息和交易服务偏好的交互作用不显著。外向性人格特征与互联服务偏好不存在显著的交互作用。(1)从平均影响来看,外向性、宜人性、互联网社交、娱乐和交易使用偏好能够正向预测网络成瘾,互联网信息使用偏好对网络成瘾没有显著的预测效果;(2)在宜人性高分组中,互联网社交服务偏好与PIU的正向关系要强于宜人性低分组。斜率检验表明对于低宜人性人格的青少年来说,互联网社交服务偏好不易导致其成瘾,而对高宜人性人格的青少年而言,互联网社交服务偏好反而容易导致其成瘾。     

青少年网络游戏行为的心理需求研究

在质的研究及理论分析的基础上,构建了16-24岁青少年网络游戏行为的心理需求模型,然后根据该模型编制问卷,进行了量的研究。探索性与验证性因素分析的结果表明:(1)青少年网络游戏心理需求问卷由现实情感的补偿与发泄、人际交往与团队归属、成就体验三个维度组成,具有良好的信度和效度指标,可以施用;(2)青少年对网络游戏的心理需求程度与其对网络游戏的使用程度显著相关。     

心理学对和谐社会的贡献

心理学在现代社会中具有满足社会需求的任务。多数国家都有这种社会需求,使得心理学成为真正意义上的跨国界学科。心理学确实能够提供解决问题的一般方法,但在面对某个国家的具体国情时则需要特殊的处理方法。在不同体制国家里所做的研究并不一定完全适用于其他国家,这意味着对一个国家里提出的心理学问题,还必须在本国内做进一步的基础研究。每个国家都需要这种心理学的本土化过程。本文提供一些研究案例,其研究成果既是有意义的,但还需要进一步研究。如何为和谐社会做贡献,作者提出了一个研究框架