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AcknowledgementThis project is the culmination of an iterative process that took a lot of time, a lot of effort, and a lot of support from several different people. First, infinite thanks are due to my advisor, Josipa Roksa, for her tireless pursuit of improving my work, and shaping each chapter of this dissertation into something that even remotely resembles a contribution to the current literature. Additional gratitude is owed to the other members of my committee, who have worked with me throughout the dissertating process, and shown the proper balance of support, criticism, and praise to allow me to successful arrive at this point. Finally, friends and family have played an important role in the process, as both have offered necessarily outlets and entertainment throughout offering the needed distraction from this research, and reminder that there is more to life than school. In no particular order, these friends and family include mother and father-figure, Emma, Ben, Drew, Jonas and Lili, Chrstina and Matt, Megan and Scott, David, Jon and Victoria, Jen and Duncan, Hank and Katie, Tashia and Dennis, the Grissmer lab, and this is by no means an exhaustive list. Although each of these people deserves an incredible amount of thanks, and I am sincerely grateful to them, this project does not happen without the guys I worked with for three years, and the challenges and rewards they provided me on nearly a daily basis. In particular, GA and JJ motivated much of my interest in children's mental health, and without them I likely would not have had the motivation and subsequent perseverance to make it through this multi-year project.ii
AbstractMost research on children's mental health focuses on symptoms thereby overlooking the correlates and consequences of diagnoses. While there is evidence that both symptoms and diagnoses are asymmetrically distributed across social groups, the social predictors of mental health diagnoses remain understudied. Additionally, the negative association between diagnosis and children's academic achievement is only vaguely understood, as most prior research documenting the negative association between children's diagnosis status and education has overlooked consideration of symptoms and other potentially confounding sociodemographic factors. Thus, the unique association between diagnosis and achievement remains unclear. Moreover, most prior research has typically examined the general (or overall) negative association between diagnosis and achievement, and not considered whether the consequences of diagnosis vary by family background. Diagnoses are given to children from families across the social class and race/ethnicity spectrum; therefore, they encounter diagnoses with varying levels of economic, cultural, and schooling resources, ideologies, and experiences. These differences may result in varying effects of diagnosis on children's outcomes, and investigation of the moderating effects of social class and race/ethnicity can help further understand how social status and mental health i...