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Publication Date
2010
Document Type
Dissertation
Department
School for Social Work
Keywords
Parent-Attitudes, Parent and teenager, Help-seeking behavior, Mentally ill children-Treatment, Adolescent psychotherapy-Parent participation, Adolescents, Parents, Mental health, Qualitative research, Pathways
Abstract
This exploratory, secondary analysis examined the subjective experience of parents whose adolescents (ages 12-17) experienced mood and/or behavior disorders. Thematic and structural analyses were used to analyze the transcripts of forty-three parents. The aim was to describe parents' experience in identifying their adolescents' mental distress and subsequently seeking formal treatment. Respondents in a mid-west city were predominately female (95%) and reflected diversity in terms of race/ethnicity, age, socio-economic status, education, and their adolescents' primary diagnoses. The results demonstrated that parent-created help-seeking processes were reflective of the unique social context of each youth/parent dyad. Ten major activity strategies were identified for describing how parents enacted their responsibilities in initiating and maintaining help-seeking pathways for their youth. A parent's utilization of a particular subset of these activity strategies over time produced a pathway whose overall impact could be characterized as either facilitating (proactive) or impeding (reactive) the youth's recovery process.
Language
English
Recommended Citation
Winbush, Victoria R., "Parent-created help-seeking pathways : a narrative explanation of their development and role in facilitating treatment for adolescents with mental illness" (2010). Dissertation, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
https://scholarworks.smith.edu/theses/387
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Comments
167 p. : ill. (some col.) Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Smith College School for Social Work, Northampton, Mass, 2009. Includes bibliographical references (p. 129-148)