This two-study dissertation explores treatment access disparities for in-person and virtual children’s mental health services during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through qualitative interviews, Study 1 will explore how caregivers have recognized, wanted, or pursued either in-person or virtual children’s mental health services while navigating the stressors that have resulted from COVID-19. Study 2 will serve to confirm and expand these findings through quantitative methods, identifying significant barriers and facilitators that impact children’s mental health treatment access.

Parenting is a primary target in child mental health interventions, and implementing such interventions requires valid, reliable, and equitable parenting assessments. However, the limited inclusion of racial and ethnic diversity in measure development hamper validity, reliability, and equity of parenting assessments. My dissertation addresses this unmet need by revising and validating the Multidimensional Assessment of Parenting Scale (MAPS) to yield a psychometrically sound measure of parenting for use in racially and ethnically diverse families.

This pilot treatment development project seeks to adapt and implement a novel CBT-Insomnia intervention for adolescents in a group outpatient suicidality treatment program (called CBT-IA), and determine its feasibility and acceptability in a real-world setting. This study aims to obtain initial evidence for the benefit of CBT-IA in improving sleep and suicidality – a first step in developing a larger-scale trial of a cost-effective intervention which harnesses a modifiable risk factor in the management of suicidal youth.

Description: Although symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) emerge in the first years of life, little is known about the trajectories of brain development and their relationship to ASD symptom onset early in life. By using multimodal neuroimaging techniques, my dissertation aims to comprehensively examine multiple aspects of brain development in early childhood in ASD. Findings from this dissertation have the potential to aid with early identification and to contribute to development of more targeted interventions.