All youth in the sample were included in this study, even
if they did not reach assessment cutoffs for clinical level
problems. Treatment seeking likely indicates significant
functional impairment, especially in a lower-income, urban,
minority population where unmet mental health needs are
higher than the general population (e.g., Kataoka et al.
2002). Thus, even those youth who did not meet clinical
cutoffs are different from community youth, since their
treatment seeking behavior indicates their problems have
reached a level of impairment that brought them to treatment.
Thus, we chose to include the full sample, as representative
of youth who experience functional impairment
due to mental health problems.