Abstract
Purpose. The purpose of this dissertation was to examine the effects of child and adolescent consumer-modal provider ethnic match, consumer ethnicity, and consumer age group on children and adolescents' clinical outcomes of 4,603 children and adolescent community mental health consumers. Method. After controlling for three variables, statistical analyses including Pearson correlations and analyses of covariance were performed on consumer ethnicity, consumer-provider ethnic match, and age group on the Child Behavior Checklist and Youth Self-Report's internalizing, externalizing, total competence, and total problems profiles, and Global Assessment of Functioning scores. Findings. Mixed results were found. Specifically, ethnically unmatched Latino and African American children and adolescents yielded significantly better clinical outcomes as compared with their ethnically matched counterparts. Ethnically matched African American children and adolescents garnered poor clinical outcomes when paired with African American mental health providers. As indicated by the GAF-difference dependent measure, all African, Latino, and White American consumers yielded positive clinical outcomes regardless of ethnic match with the exception of ethnically unmatched White American middle adolescents and ethnically unmatched Latino American late adolescents. Both ethnically unmatched late adolescent Latino Americans and middle adolescent White Americans, respectively, garnered poor treatment outcomes.