Journal of Child and Family Studies, Vol. 6, 1997, pp. 177-190 Measuring Child Mental Health Status for Services Research Sheny Glied, Ph.D., 1,10 Christina W. Hoven, Dr.PH., 2 A. Bowen Garrett, Ph.D., 3 Robert E. Moore, Dr.PH., 4 Philip Leaf, Ph.D., 5 Hector R. Bird, M.D., 6 Sherryl Goodman, Ph.D., 7 Darrel Regier, M.D, M.RH., 8 and Margarita Alegria, Ph.D. 9 Epidemiological studies of the prevalence of mental health disorders typically contain multiple measures of mental health, using different instruments and different informants (child, parent, and interviewer). We used the Methods for the Epidemiology of Child and Adolescents Mental Disorder (MECA) study of U.S. youth to assess the effects of employing a range of these measures in mental health services research. We examined the effect of including various measures of mental health status in regressions of income on mental health service use. The estimated effect of income on service use varied widely, depending on the measure of mental health status used. Some measures of mental health status have little explanatory power in service use regressions. Measures of mental health status based on parental assessment of impairment 1Assistant Professor, Division of Health Policy and Management, Columbia School of Public Health and Department of Economics, New York, NY. 2Assistant Professor, Epidemiology in Psychiatry, Columbia University - NYS Psychiatric Institute, New York, NY. 3Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy Research, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA. 4Assistant Professor, Epidemiology in Psychiatry, Columbia University - NYS Psychiatric Institute, New York, NY. 5Professor, Department of Mental Hygiene, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD. 6Professor, Psychiatry, Columbia University - NYS Psychiatric Institute, New York, NY. 7Professor, Department of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA. 8Associate Director, Epidemiology and Health Policy Research, National Institute of Mental Health, Rockville, MD. 9Associate Professor, School of Public Health, University of Puerto Rico, San Juan, PR. 10Correspondence should be directed to Sherry Glied, Division of Health Policy and Management, Columbia School of Public Health, 600 West 168th St, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10032. 177 1062-1024/97««00>177$12.5<M> C 1997 Human Sciences Press, Inc.