| dc.description.abstract | Children and adolescents experience high rates of mental health disorders, yet few receive mental health services. Half of the youth who do receive professional help are likely to dropout and this pattern appears to be exacerbated for Black and Hispanic youth. There is little consistency in the current literature regarding which factors contribute to dropout or why youth stop attending therapy. This study aims to develop a theoretical base for psychotherapy dropout and delineate how this differs between Black, Hispanic, and White adolescents. Specifically, process-level variables such as time on a waitlist, rate of symptom reduction, therapeutic alliance, and time between sessions, are examined for their contribution to therapy dropout in adolescence. The current study utilizes an extant database from a university-based clinic. Logistic regressions examined the relationship between the binary outcome (dropout) and the proposed variables. The results indicated that a Black or mixed-race client was significantly more likely to dropout than a White client with each additional session attended. This suggests that engagement with both the client and parent are paramount in the first session for Black and mixed-race clients as they may only attend a few sessions. The exact mechanisms hypothesized to differentiate between White, Black, and Hispanic clients were not supported by the data, but there is emerging evidence that Black adolescents do not dropout of therapy for the same reasons as White or Hispanic youth. | en |
