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GENERAL DISCUSSION 135 and adolescents’ psychosocial care. Assessment of the questionnaire showed that it had good psychometric properties regarding consistency, structure, and parent-child agreement, as well as reasonable validity (criterion validity). The BTPS-exp enabled us to assess the opinions of parents and adolescents in the community during the various stages of the help-seeking process and the beginning of treatment. We showed that in the community a majority of parents and adolescents expected barriers to child and adolescent psychosocial care. Both adolescents and parents expected barriers most often regarding treatment (i.e., the expectation that treatment would ultimately be irrelevant) and least often regarding their personal environment (i.e., stressors and obstacles competing with treatment). These findings may explain why not all children with psychosocial problems enrol in psychosocial care, a finding also confirmed in this thesis (Chapter 6) [2-9]. Further, it is questionable whether treatment would be relevant for children and families who expect it not to be effective. On the one hand, these expectations might be caused or fed by negative views on psychosocial care for children and adolescents, as incidents in child psychosocial care gain a lot of media attention [33]. On the other hand, these expectations might be an expression of children’s and parents’ views or experiences that treatments are not attuned to their needs, for example not focused on what they perceive as the most relevant problem [33- 36]. Adolescents expected barriers much more frequently than their parents. Previous research mostly shows that parents and children differ in their views; for example, parents usually score higher on the child’s psychosocial problems than the children themselves [37-39]. An explanation for this may be that adolescents are reluctant or afraid to communicate about their problems with care professionals. This reluctance can be understood in the light of their developmental stage, characterized by creating distance from and less dependency on parents and educators [40-43]. These findings stress the importance of making care easily accessible for children and adolescents. They may also imply that, once children and adolescents are in care, it is important to sort out the expectations of the child and the family regarding potential barriers, including the child-therapist relation [40]. What further stands out is that enroled adolescents (i.e., the care sample), systematically expected fewer barriers than their peers in the community sample (Chapter 3). This might simply suggest that adolescents with psychosocial problems enroled in care because they expected fewer barriers. It might also suggest that although adolescents in general have a sceptical view of psychosocial care, this view is adjusted once they are actually in contact with care. The theory of cognitive dissonance might help to explain this difference in the views of the care and community samples. This