Opening the Black Box

Abstract

Objective: The Taxonomy of Care for Youth was developed to gather information about the care offered to children and adolescents with behavioral and emotional problems in various care settings. The aim was to determine similarities and differences in the content of care and thereby to classify the care offered to these children and youth within and across care organizations. Method: Interventions (N ¼ 56) offered in primary health care, child and youth care, and mental health care were assessed by using descriptors. Professionals scored the degree of applicability of these descriptors and interventions with similar descriptors were merged. Results: As a result, the interventions could be classified into 7 main types of support and the total number of interventions reduced to 27. Conclusion: The descriptors used in this study were able to classify the various kinds of care offered based on their content, thereby creating an overview of distinct interventions.

Differences in care provided to children with behavioral and emotional problems in a delineated region by using the Taxonomy of Care for Youth (TOCFY)

“…We measured the core and program elements of the types of support offered by the four care organizations by using TOCFY. This measure was used and evaluated in previous studies (Evenboer et al, 2014(Evenboer et al, , 2016a(Evenboer et al, , 2016b. The interventions were grouped into seven main types of support, i.e.…”

“…The interventions were grouped into seven main types of support, i.e. 'family support', 'parent support', 'individual child support', 'trauma support', 'experiential learning support' (interventions which are aimed at supporting youth by actively engaging them in activities they can learn from within the context of treatment), 'independent living support' (interventions which prepare and stimulate adolescents to independently organize their own housing and life), and 'foster care support' (Evenboer et al, 2014). For each main type of support, we collected core elements using all the interventions included in the EYI database (Netherlands Youth Institute, 2013).…”

“…All manuals of the interventions from this database were analyzed in order to achieve a good representation of the types of support offered within the four care organizations. The 20 most frequently used core elements per main type of support in these intervention manuals were collected, resulting in predefined lists for each main type of support (Evenboer et al, 2014). Professionals working at the care organizations scored the applicability of the core elements for the interventions using a seven-point Likert scale ranging from (1) 'very poor' to (7) 'very good'.…”

“…'content of the type of support', the interventions were divided into seven main types of support, namely 'family support', 'parenting support', 'individual child support', 'trauma support', 'foster care support', 'experiential learning support', and 'independent living support'. A set of 20 core elements was constructed for each main type of support (Evenboer, Huyghen, Tuinstra, Reijneveld, & Knorth, 2014), which enabled a specification of the content of interventions (cf. Abraham & Michie, 2008).…”