Model for determining Mental Health Provider Caseload?

[Secrist, Kevin]

Good afternoon SPSS Guru's
 
I am attempting to build a model that will determine the average
caseload of a mental health therapists working with school age youth.  I
have approximately 10,000 cases that I could utilize and the variables
of gender, age, grade, mental health diagnosis as well as all of these
clients are either receiving public assistance or are in the working
poor class.  I can also get data on prior caseloads across the past 12
years.
 
Is this enough information to build a model? if so, what model would I
utilize? or is there already one in the package?  
 
Thank you,
 
 
Kevin Secrist, Administrative Analyst, Associate
ASD
Butte County Behavioral Health
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Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often
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Ann. Math. Stat. 33 (1962) - John w. Tukey

 

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[Maguin, Eugene]

Kevin,

A couple of comments. First, (and I may be misunderstanding your data) it
seems that you have only client level data (gender, age, grade, mental
health diagnosis, ses). Your DV is to be therapist caseload. Given the data
that you have, how do you calculate that? Do you know the identity of the
therapist that saw each client? Again, I have no experience with this sort
of analysis, but it seems to me that therapist caseload might vary over time
so that the caseload this week is not the caseload four or eight weeks from
now. So, I think you might need to define a time period in which to talk
about caseload. Another extremely important point. Think about your
predictors. You have client level data but you are predicting a therapist
level variable. How are you going to translate your client level IVs to
therapist level IVs?

Second, you asked whether you have enough information to build a model. I
think the answer is Yes. Your theory-model is that client characteristics
determines caseload. I want to offer a counter theory-model: Agency and
therapist characteristics better predict caseload than does client
characteristics.

Once you solve these problems/questions, I think you might use either
regression or, maybe, ordinal regression, for the analysis.

Gene Maguin

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