Scott Leon
	Title:	Assistant Professor, Clinical Psychology; Ph.D.
	Office:	Damen Hall 653
	Phone:	773.508.8684
	E-mail:	sleon@luc.edu

Personal Information

Ph.D., Clinical Psychology, Northwestern University, 2002
B.A., University of California, San Diego, 1995

Research Interests:
The primary aim of my research is to improve mental health services for children and adolescents, particularly for youth in the child welfare system. Mental health services are delivered to children and adolescents in a variety of contexts, ranging from individual psychotherapy to residential treatment and psychiatric hospitalization. An evolved system of care delivers the most appropriate and effective services to youth depending on their clinical presentations, social environments, and strengths. One of my areas of research involves determining how people make decisions about when children should be psychiatrically hospitalized. This research allows us to determine how often children are hospitalized appropriately (i.e., they demonstrate suicidal behavior) or inappropriately (i.e., they do not demonstrate any serious risk to themselves or others). When youth are not offered services that match their needs, we can provide the appropriate feedback to providers and administrators in the system of care as a point of departure for continuous quality improvement efforts and better mental health outcomes.

Using a growth modeling approach, I have recently begun to develop statistically derived expected courses of mental health improvement for youth in the child welfare system receiving a mix of intensive community-based services. By developing expected courses of improvement, I hope to create expectations for change that are tailored to the individual child or adolescent. When children fail to reach their expectations for change, we can then begin to explore the reasons for relatively poor improvement. These reasons could lead to the exploration of a wide range of variables from therapist interventions (e.g., use of Empirically Supported Treatments) to variables at the level of the provider (e.g., cultural climate), community (e.g., presence of community violence, recreational activities, jobs), and the broader System of Care (e.g., investment in community resources, adherence to CASSP principles).

Recent Publications:
Leon, S.C., Martinovich, Z., Lutz, W., & Lyons, J.S. (2005). The effect of therapist experience on psychotherapy outcomes. Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy 12, 417-426.

Leon, S.C., Snowden, J., Bryant, F.B., & Lyons, J.S. (2006). The hospital as predictor of children's and adolescents' length of stay. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 45, 322-328.

Lutz, W. Saunders, S., Leon, S.C., Martinovich, Z., Kosfelder, J., & Schulte, D., et al. (2006). Empirically and clinically useful decision-making in psychotherapy: Differential predictions with treatment response models. Psychological Assessment 18, 133-141.

Snowden, J., Leon, S.C., Bryant, F. B., & Lyons, J.S. (in press). Predictors of psychiatric hospital decision-making among youth in the child welfare system. Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology.

Leon, S.C., Ragsdale, B., Miller, S., & Spaccirelli, S. (in press). Trauma and resilience among youth in substitute care demonstrating sexual behavior problems. Child Abuse & Neglect.