Overview
Research
Seminars
Training Goals
Application Procedures
Faculty
Academy Website
APPIC Match Policies
Research Projects

Internship in Clinical Child Psychology
Research Programs

Project Title
Parenting Assessment Team

Supervisors
Teresa Jacobson, Ph.D. and Laura Miller, M.D.

Description
The Parenting Assessment Team (PAT) was formed to assist the purpose of assisting the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) and the Cook County Juvenile Court in evaluating parenting capabilities of parents with serious mental illnesses who are alleged perpetrators of child abuse or neglect. The PAT consists of a psychiatrist, child psychologist, a coordinator, and outreach workers, The team has both service and research components.

Service. The PAT primarily provides a service to DCFS, although its evaluations are also designed to be of use to the Juvenile court. The cases that DCFS is having the most trouble evaluating are the top priority cases for the PAT. The assessments performed by the PAT include structured and clinical psychiatric interviews, pediatric evaluations of the children, psychological and developmental assessments of children, including interviews and standardized tests, assessment of parent-child attachment quality, evaluations in the home setting, structured and clinical assessment of social support, collateral history from significant others, assessment of the home environment, urine drug screens of the parent, and review of pertinent mental health, pediatric and criminal records.

Research. In addition to weekly assessments of parenting competency in parents with severe mental illness, the team is also undertaking a study to develop a set of reliable and valid tools to evaluate parenting competency in mentally ill parents. The research project addresses the following two questions: (1) Which parenting assessment data can reliably distinguish between mentally ill parents who have put their children at risk, and mentally ill parents who have not put their children at risk? (2) Which parenting assessment tools would be useful as screening instruments, and which as intensive evaluation instruments?

Psychology Interns Roles and Contributions
Interns participate both in the actual developmental assessments of children, in interviewing parents, and in report writing. They also meet with team members each week to review and discuss ongoing cases. In these meetings, interns present findings from the portion of the evaluation that they conducted. Psychology interns have participated in the study of Expressed Emotion (EE) in parents who were assessed by the team and determining whether levels of EE differ in parents who (a) were found to be adequate parents (b) were found to lack minimal parenting skills. Two manuscripts are planned to be submitted to peer reviewed journals. One intern also wrote a document, in conjunction with a child psychiatry fellow, for Juvenile Court judges describing major mental illnesses and their effects on parenting competency.