This study investigates the Intensive In-home Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Service (IICAPS), a large-scale home-based intervention that collaboratively engages the family, school, and various other service providers (e.g. health practitioners or judicial systems) to prevent the hospitalization, institutionalization or out-of-home placement of children and adolescents with serious emotional disturbance. Multi-informant data (youth, parents and clinician) on the level of youth problem severity and functioning was gathered from 7169 youth and their families served by the IICAPS network, pre- and post-intervention. A newly developed "Multi-informant Latent Consensus" (MILC) approach was employed to measure mental health "baseline levels" and change, within a Structural Equation Modeling framework. The MILC approach demonstrated promise integrating information from multiple informants involved in the therapeutic process to yield a more accurate and systemic view of a child's level of functioning and problem severity than each report taken individually. Results indicated that the IICAPS family and community based intervention model led to a reduction of problem severity and improved functioning in children and adolescents with severe emotional disturbance.
Keywords: IICAPS, in-home intervention; Ohio Scales; adolescents; children; psychiatric hospitalizations; severe emotional disturbance.
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