NCJ Number
210922
Journal
Social Work in Mental Health Volume: 3 Issue: 3 Dated: 2005 Pages: 287-304
Date Published
2005
Length
18 pages
Annotation
This article describes an adolescent mental health clinic's experience in involving clinicians, supervisors, and program managers in the use of clinical data-mining (CDM) for practice-based research.
Abstract
The data that was "mined" came from an adolescent self-assessment questionnaire ("Adquest") administered to youth coming to New York City's Mount Sinai Adolescent Health Center, which serves inner-city youth. The project retrieved, aggregated, and analyzed Adquest information over a 1-year period for the purpose of analyzing its programmatic implications. The primary goals were to promote reflection among staff and provide insights about the clinical challenge of what adolescents want and need to talk about with counselors. Eight data-mining work groups, plus one work group that focused on the clinical uses of Adquest, were established. Overall, the convergence of each work group's analysis of what clients were indicating about their concerns, behaviors, risk exposure, and desire to talk about issues in their lives produced a focused organizational reflection on the match between the services available and clients' perceptions of their needs. The project provided a collaborative focus on the expressed needs of those coming for services and the implications this has for service design and implementation. The use of Adquest as the primary data source let the clients speak to the practitioners about why they had come to the facility, and the collaborative analysis of the data spurred practitioners to reflect on the relevance of their services and methods to those being served. 22 references