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CHAPTER 3 46 could lead to the retrospective perception of less barriers. Ameans to reach this is to ask parents about their expectations of barriers before they actually are involved in care or expect to be so. Besides linguistic adaptations, this also requires a reconsideration of the topics covered by the various items because some topics may be difficult to imagine in advance of receiving care. Moreover, assessing expectations at the beginning of treatment is important to predict responses to treatment and therapeutic change. For example, addressing expectations regarding treatment relevance and therapist relationship early in the treatment process might decrease the high number of treatment drop-outs. These types of barriers are important predictors of premature treatment termination [23, 24]. For young children, parents will be the sole informant, but for adolescents, they themselves are likely to be important informants as well and they are often decisive in seeking and participating in care [25] For example, a recent study showed that many parents saw an urgent need for care for their adolescent children, but that the adolescents frequently refused to seek care [9]. Therefore, we created in addition to the parent version, an adolescent version of the BTPS-exp, which previously had not been available for the original or the revised version. To date, evidence for the validity of the BTPS-exp is lacking. In order to fill this gap, the aim of this study was to assess its psychometric properties in a Dutch sample of both children and adolescents, in care and in the community. Internal consistency, scale structure, parent-adolescent agreement, and validity were assessed. Addressing fundamental facets of the scale will open avenues of research for better understanding barriers and for procedures that might be used to surmount them. METHOD Study design We used data from the first measurement wave of a large prospective cohort study of Dutch children aged 4-18, called TakeCare [26, 27]. TakeCare is conducted by the Collaborative Centre on Care for Children and Youth (C4Youth) and is designed to investigate the trajectories and outcomes of children receiving psychosocial care in a single Dutch region. The design was assessed by the Medical Ethical Committee of the University Medical Center Groningen, and approved without requiring full assessment. Informed consent was obtained from all participating respondents.