Methodological Challenges in the National Evaluation of the Comprehensive Community Mental Health Services for Children and Their Families Program

Abstract

The Comprehensive Community Mental Health Services for Children and Their Families Program is the federal government's principal response to the service needs of the estimated 4.5-6.3 million children in the US who have serious emotional disturbance (Friedman, Katz-Leavy, Manderscheid, & Sondheimer, 1999). The program provides grants to states, communities, territories, and American Indian tribes to improve and expand their systems of care to meet the needs of children and adolescents with serious emotional disturbance and their families. These include children and youth with a serious emotional disturbance (SED) from birth to the age of 21 years who currently have, or at any time during the past year, had a mental, behavioral, or emotional disorder of sufficient duration to meet diagnostic criteria specified in the DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association, 1994). The two major goals of this large-scale program evaluation are (1) to obtain an overall program evaluation of the Comprehensive Community Mental Health Services for Children and Their Families Program that informs federal policy making and (2) to develop evaluation capacity locally within the funded communities. In the conduct of a large-scale program evaluation, a significant amount of tension can exist between these two goals. This dynamic tension creates a unique contextual challenge that has implications for the overall design and successful implementation of evaluation strategies. This chapter describes the methodological challenges involved in this large-scale evaluation. These challenges are important to consider as we move into the future as they parallel those encountered in efforts to evaluate the effects of other socially complex services delivered in community settings (Herrell & Straw, 2002; Wolff, 2000). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)(chapter)