Private treatment centers are important in delivering drug abuse treatment services. As privately-funded centers competing for scarce resources, their response to new treatment technologies should be especially dynamic. We would address the adoption of new treatment practices through cross-sectional and longitudinal data within an existing representative national sample of 450 private for-profit and not-for-profit substance abuse treatment centers, with two phases of data collection: 1. Following instrumentation, we would conduct on-site visits at the 450 centers. This new data collection would focus upon an updating of the organizational and managerial features of the treatment centers, would involve collection of new data germane to new practice adoption. This would generate a generalizable description of the patterns of new practice adoption across this sample of treatment centers and would allow for testing hypotheses about organizational and managerial correlates of patterns of adoption. 2. The second phase would involve a re- visit to the sample of centers, with an updating of organizational and managerial data, and a reassessment of data about new treatment practice adoption. With the phase 1 baselines, we could describe the process dynamics of new practice adoption and move toward the construction of causal models of program adoption. Classes of independent variables that may be linked to different patterns of adoption behavior are: (1) the external environment surrounding the treatment organization, (2) the treatment center's internal organizational and managerial environment, and (3) the treatment center's organizational culture. In terms of """"""""outcome"""""""" behaviors, every treatment center would fall in one of 7 empirical categories relative to the center's response to a new substance abuse treatment practice. In specifying the innovations and outcome measurements, we propose to work with an Expert Panel in deriving a set of treatment practice innovations for study within two general realms: new medications and new psychosocial treatments.
Showing the most recent 10 out of 64 publications
