Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
ReviewThe Effectiveness of School-Based Mental Health Services for Elementary-Aged Children: A Meta-Analysis
Section snippets
Study Selection Criteria
Studies that satisfied 6 criteria were included: the study assessed school-based services specifically targeting mental health problems; service was implemented by school-based personnel or personnel indigenous to the school environment (research staff could be involved but could not be the primary service implementer); the study entailed a randomized, between-subjects, controlled comparison or quasi-experimental design that used matched samples to minimize selection bias; the study assessed
Preliminary Findings
Forty-three studies evaluating 49,941 children met the inclusion criteria33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73 (see Table 1 and Supplement 1, available online, for characteristics and references of studies included in the meta-analysis). All studies involved classroom implementation except for 2 (5%). Interestingly, only a minority of studies (25.6%; k = 11) evaluated
Discussion
The present meta-analysis synthesized the empirical literature on controlled evaluations of elementary school-based mental health services delivered by school personnel, computing overall pooled effects across studies, and determining factors associated with variations in the effects. Services delivered by school-based personnel collectively demonstrated a small-to-medium effect on child mental health problems, with particularly large effects associated with targeted interventions and selective
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This work was supported in part by the National Institutes of Health (K23 MH090247; principal investigator, Dr. Comer).
Disclosure: Dr. Comer has received royalties from Worth/Macmillan Publishers and has received grant support from the Andrew Kukes Foundation for Social Anxiety. Ms. Cornacchio has received funding support from the National Institutes of Health. Mss. Sanchez, Poznanski, Golik, and Mr. Chou report no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest.