Grant: Project Grant

One of the most common neurodevelopmental disorders encountered by health service providers is attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which affects around 5-8% of Canadian children and adolescents. Canadian families today are culturally and ethnically diverse, and the Metro Vancouver, BC, area has high representation of Asian families. All available evidence suggests that Asian Canadians underutilize mental health services, suggesting the importance of improving culturally competent and sensitive services that meet their needs. This study investigates how families make decisions about what treatment to pursue for their children or adolescents with ADHD, or whether to pursue treatment at all, and how this may relate to cultural background. We will recruit 176 families living in Metro Vancouver (88 Asian Canadian and 88 White Canadian) whose children or adolescents are being evaluated for ADHD. We will ask families their beliefs about the causes of ADHD, their perceptions of what is appropriate treatment, and their experiences with service providers, to see how this predicts the type of treatment that these families seek and receive, and their satisfaction with treatment, over a period of 8 months. We will evaluate whether treatment pathways are different in Asian Canadian families compared to White Canadian families, and explore whether the gender of the child/adolescent matters. The study goal is to help service providers who treat ADHD to deliver better care for diverse families. Many families never pursue the treatment recommended by a service provider, or they may begin treatment and drop out. By gaining a better understanding of what beliefs encourage families to seek certain treatments, and how these beliefs may be different among Asian Canadian families relative to White Canadian families, this can help service providers tailor their recommendations to the needs of families, and to create treatments that are more consistent with these beliefs.