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Adolescents' Self-Reported Risk Factors and Desire to Talk About Family and Friends: Implications for Practice and Research

NCJ Number
210661
Journal
Social Work in Mental Health Volume: 3 Issue: 1/2 Dated: 2004 Pages: 191-210
Author(s)
Vincent Giannone; Daniel Medeiros; Jennifer Elliott; Caroline Perez; Erika Carlson; Irwin Epstein
Date Published
2004
Length
20 pages
Annotation
Through completion of Adquest, an adolescent self-assessment questionnaire, this article examines how much adolescents entering a urban mental health program wanted to talk about family and friends with their counselors and its mediation through behavioral risk factors.
Abstract
This article is part of a larger practice-based research effort to better understand issues in the lives of urban adolescents that bring them into mental health treatment. This understanding is based on answers to a set of questions about areas of their lives that are believed to be important to them through a self-administered intake questionnaire, Adquest. The focus is upon adolescents’ self-reported behavioral risk factors and concerns about family and friends. It explores gender differences and age-graded changes in adolescents’ perceptions of family and friends and recognizes adolescents’ developmental need to have concomitant changes in significant others in their environment, within their families and other social institutions, such as schools. A number of themes are developed concerning empirical understanding of a clinical population of urban youth. These adolescents are seen as being most concerned and worried about their families, and when asked, they will readily identify these concerns on a paper and pencil task. Because treatment usually emphasizes individual therapy for adolescents, it is important that clinicians expand their inquiry to include the adolescents’ worries and concerns about their family. References