Personal, Family, And Service Use Characteristics Of Young People Served By An Interagency Community-Based System Of Care

In order to create a more functional system of care, agency administrators, direct service providers, the young people served, their parents, and advocates worked together to assess local needs and existing service features, and to plan required changes. This article presents data on some personal and family characteristics and patterns of service utilization of the young people served in this system of care. These data include the child's age, gender, race or ethnicity, learning characteristics, psychiatric status, and adjudications; parent marital status and employment, living arrangements for the child, and family history of risk factors; and the child's history of services and placements. Some relationships within the present data and between the present data and those of other system-of-care descriptions are discussed.