Mental health service underutilization among African American adolescents is well documented, yet not fully understood. Discordance between adolescents and their parents on perceived need for seeing a counselor for an emotional need or psychiatrist for psychiatric or medical services may help explain low service use among this population. This exploratory, prospective study examined the relationship between parent–adolescent concordance on perceived need for emotional counseling or psychiatric services and mental health service use. The relationships between gender and perceived service need and concordance and adolescent severity of depressive symptoms were also explored. Parent-adolescent dyads (n=108) receiving community-based adolescent outpatient mental health services responded to interview questions concerning their perception of whether an emotional counselor and a psychiatrist were needed in the past six months. Findings revealed low parent-adolescent concordance on perceived need for an emotional counselor and a psychiatrist. A greater proportion of adolescents reported a need than parents. There was no association between gender and perceived need for an emotional counselor and a psychiatrist. Lower rates of parent-adolescent concordance were found among youth reporting elevated depressive symptoms compared to youth reporting normal range symptoms. Concordant dyads kept a higher number of appointments than discordant dyads. Implications for clinical social work practice and future research are discussed.

Families play an important role in the lives of individuals with mental illness. Coping with the strain of shifting roles and multiple challenges of caregiving can have a huge impact. Limited information exists regarding race-related differences in families' caregiving experiences, their abilities to cope with the mental illness of a loved one, or their interactions with mental health service systems. This study examined race-related differences in the experiences of adults seeking to participate in the National Alliance on Mental Illness Family-to-Family Education Program due to mental illness of a loved one. Participants were 293 White and 107 African American family members who completed measures of problem- and emotion-focused coping, knowledge about mental illness, subjective illness burden, psychological distress, and family functioning. Multiple regression analyses were used to determine race-related differences. African American caregivers reported higher levels of negative caregiving experiences, less knowledge of mental illness, and higher levels of both problem-solving coping and emotion-focused coping, than White caregivers. Mental health programs serving African American families should consider targeting specific strategies to address caregiving challenges, support their use of existing coping mechanisms and support networks, and increase their knowledge of mental illness.

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Social work research is ati essential component of a doctoral education. Students' perspectives need to be considered when determining how social work research is taught. Students enrolled in a social work doctoral program conducted a single case study that took a retrospective look at the student experience in a two-semester research practicum at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. A description of the research practicum course was drawn from key contact interviews and course materials. A review of archived records located 17 practicum publications and presentations. Cohort members' reflections on the research practicum course were analyzed using thematic content analysis. The case study informs the future design of doctoral research practicum courses and the socialization of social work educators and researchers.Learning how to design research projects and write up the results is essential in doctoral education. The perspective of the doctoral students themselves is key to the debate on the central position of research in training the next generation of social workers. We conducted a single case study in an attempt to understand the experiences of the students who participated in a 2009 research practicum course in a social work doctoral program at