This study encompasses five lines of work focused on the National Comorbidity Survey (Adolescent), a national survey of the mental health of adolescents. The NCS-A has interviewed over 10,000 12- to 17-year-olds and administered questionnaires to parents of more than 6,600 of them, using an adolescent version of the WHO CIDI. A small K-SADS clinical reappraisal study was also conducted. The study’s aims are to:

• multiply impute K-SADS diagnoses for all 10,000 adolescents and perform parallel analyses of CIDI-A and predicted K-SADS diagnoses. The multiple imputations and the MI analysis programs used to analyze them will be made publicly available as part of the NCS-A public use dataset;
• analyze criterion- and diagnosis-level concordance of CIDI and KSADS responses, to identify CIDI-A items that might be imprecise or lack clarity and therefore might be suitable targets for rewording or deletion;
• improve short self-report and parent-report screening scales for any disorder and for severe emotional distress based on an analysis of an extensive battery of screening questions in the NCS-A;
• write and distribute a computer program that can be used by school counselors, pediatricians, and others to assign individual-level predicted probabilities of SED from adolescent self-report and parent-report screening scores using Bayesian methods that incorporate information about subpopulation prevalences based on screening scale distributions;
• generate small-area (state and county) estimates of the prevalence of SED for mental health treatment planning, and demonstrate methodology for similar estimates at the school level. Bayesian small-area estimation methods will be used here to borrow strength from screening questions that are included both in the NCS-A and in the US National Health Interview Survey, as well as from geocoded data that can be mapped onto the NCS-A.