CLIENT SATISFACTION WITH MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES: A QUALITATIVE APPROACH TO UNDERSTANDING FAMILY’S EXPERIENCE OF RESIDENTIAL CARE

This qualitative study examined parents’ perceptions of a residential mental health treatment facility in terms of the apparent impact their child’s stay had on the family’s health and well-being and on the focal child’s behavioral and emotional functioning. This thesis provides insight into how caregivers experience life with a child who has severe behavioral and emotional difficulties. Data from eight families were categorized into themes based on parent’s responses to a semi-structured question format. Results indicate that regardless of whether the child who was discharged from the residential treatment program had positive treatment gains or poor treatment gains, parents unilaterally viewed the intensive short-term treatment as an extremely valuable service that should continue in the future. Parents attributed the positive experience at the treatment facility and their child’s treatment outcome, in part, due to the personal qualities of the workers at the treatment facility, as well as the highly consistent and structured nature of the facility. Recommendations parents offered in order to improve residential services included a reduced wait-list period, services available to children at younger ages, more parental education regarding effective child management strategies and increased support for caregivers

The quality of school track assignment decisions by teachers

We study the quality of secondary school track assignment decisions in the Netherlands, using a regression discontinuity design. In 6th grade, primary school teachers assign each student to a secondary school track. If a student scores above a track-specific cutoff on the standardized end-of-primary education test, the teacher can upwardly revise this assignment. By comparing students just left and right of these cutoffs, we find that between 50-90% of the students are "trapped in track": these students are on the high track after four years, only if they started on the high track in first year. The remaining (minority of) students are "always low": they are always on the low track after four years, independently of where they started. These proportions hold for students near the cutoffs that shift from the low to the high track in first year by scoring above the cutoff. Hence, for a majority of these students the initial (unrevised) track assignment decision is too low. The results replicate across most of the secondary school tracks, from the vocational to the academic tracks, and stand out against an education system with a lot of upward and downward track mobility

Education Design Matters

Education is an investment in human capital which has large positive impacts upon individual and social outcomes. This implies that policymakers have an enormous responsibility when using scarce resources as to design the education system. Policymakers like to make informed decisions, but this requires knowledge about the consequences of intended policies. This thesis aims at contributing to this knowledge by means of four self-contained chapters on the impact of design features in education. It contains, among others, a chapter on ability peer effects in the classroom. If peer effects exist, reorganizing students across classes could increase aggregate student performance without spending additional resources

Methods in Molecular Biology

Developmental processes are inherently dynamic and understanding them requires quantitative measurements of gene and protein expression levels in space and time. While live imaging is a powerful approach for obtaining such data, it is still a challenge to apply it over long periods of time to large tissues, such as the embryonic spinal cord in mouse and chick. Nevertheless, dynamics of gene expression and signaling activity patterns in this organ can be studied by collecting tissue sections at different developmental stages. In combination with immunohistochemistry, this allows for measuring the levels of multiple developmental regulators in a quantitative manner with high spatiotemporal resolution. The mean protein expression levels over time, as well as embryo-to-embryo variability can be analyzed. A key aspect of the approach is the ability to compare protein levels across different samples. This requires a number of considerations in sample preparation, imaging and data analysis. Here we present a protocol for obtaining time course data of dorsoventral expression patterns from mouse and chick neural tube in the first 3 days of neural tube development. The described workflow starts from embryo dissection and ends with a processed dataset. Software scripts for data analysis are included. The protocol is adaptable and instructions that allow the user to modify different steps are provided. Thus, the procedure can be altered for analysis of time-lapse images and applied to systems other than the neural tube

Reorganisation ofHoxdregulatory landscapes during the evolution of a snake-like body plan

Within land vertebrate species, snakes display extreme variations in their body plan, characterized by the absence of limbs and an elongated morphology. Such a particular interpretation of the basic vertebrate body architecture has often been associated with changes in the function or regulation of Hox genes. Here, we use an interspecies comparative approach to investigate different regulatory aspects at the snake HoxD locus. We report that, unlike in other vertebrates, snake mesoderm-specific enhancers are mostly located within the HoxD cluster itself rather than outside. In addition, despite both the absence of limbs and an altered Hoxd gene regulation in external genitalia, the limb-associated bimodal HoxD chromatin structure is maintained at the snake locus. Finally, we show that snake and mouse orthologous enhancer sequences can display distinct expression specificities. These results show that vertebrate morphological evolution likely involved extensive reorganisation at Hox loci, yet within a generally conserved regulatory framework.Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia grant: (PTDB/BEX-BID/0899/2014); Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Forderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung grant: (310030B_138662); Claraz Foundation; Université de Genève; Instituto Federal de Educação Ciência e Tecnologia do Espírito Santo