Abstract:
Using the newest data of the National Survey of Children's Health (NSCH) 2017-2018, this thesis examines the difficulties in accessing mental health care services among children with depression/anxiety, Autism or Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), and Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD)/Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). It attempts to investigate the barriers, and challenges, which prevent children with depression/anxiety and ASD/ADD/ADHD from accessing the mental health care services needed and their association with the difficulty getting these services. Adapting Andersen’s Behavioral Model of health care utilization, which involves three critical elements related to the associated factors with health care utilization, including predisposing factors, enabling factors, and need factors. To do that, many analyses have been conducted for all two conditions separately, first, to measure the sample characteristics and distribution of
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sociodemographic and health-related characteristics, weighted descriptive analysis was made, then to assess the association between difficulties in accessing mental health care services and children’s characteristics, weighted bivariate analyses were performed. Moreover, two binary multiple logistic regression models and two classification trees using CART were built to identify the factors that influence the mental health services access and the association between dependent and independent variables in order to identify the risk factors associated with difficulties in obtaining mental health services. The results showed that most of the independent variables greatly influence the difficulty in accessing health care services, which was expected. To be more specific, both methods have proven that the enabling factors, such as adequacy of health insurance and ability of families to pay medical/health-related bills have more influence on children with depression/anxiety and ASD/ADD/ADHD, which leads to difficulties in accessing mental health care services.
