FOCUS
In the United States, up to 80 percent of youth in need of psychological services never receive them despite the significant advancements in psychological intervention research. Treatment access disparities are largest among Asian American youth, especially immigrants, reporting the lowest service utilization rates than any other ethnic minority groups. As a clinical scientist, Jenna aspires to reduce this disparity by testing and disseminating accessible, equitable alternatives to traditional psychotherapy for these underserved youth. Thus, Jenna’s work has focused on developing brief, scalable mental health interventions that aim to overcome individual, familial, and systems-level access barriers. Further, Jenna aims to maximize the impact of this research by bridging the gap between research and policy. It is her personal and professional goal to help correct the decades-long history of inaccessible mental health care that disproportionately harms racial/ethnic minority and immigrant youth.
MORE ABOUT JENNA
Growing up as a first-generation immigrant Korean American, Jenna closely observed how culture and immigration status interact with mental health issues to exacerbate the treatment-access barriers that minorities face. The obstacles she faced and witnessed have naturally fueled her personal and professional drive to build scalable solutions to mental health care disparities, specifically for low-income and immigrant groups.
DISSERTATION GRANT AWARDEE — SPRING 2023
Reaching the families Single Session Interventions are best positioned to help: Empowering Economically Insecure Parents to Manage Child Anxiety
Despite advancements in the treatment and implementation of evidence-based child anxiety interventions, up to 80% of anxious youth, especially those experiencing financial insecurity, never access care or drop out prematurely after connecting to care. Such disparity reflects a need for more accessible, rapidly scalable interventions; self-guided single-session interventions (SSIs) may offer a promising path toward this goal, given their demonstrated clinical utility, potential for disseminability, and low cost. Thus, this study will evaluate the effects of Project EMPOWER, an evidence-based, online, self-guided SSI designed to help reduce parent accommodation, a parenting behavior identified as a strong risk factor for anxiety in offspring. Results will forward efforts to bring brief, effective anxiety interventions to the economically insecure children and families they are designed to help.
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE HPRS DISSERTATION AWARDS, CLICK HERE.
