The proposed project is designed to foster interdisciplinary collaboration between social psychology and mental health services research. The project is unique because it begins not with data collection, but with existing data from a randomized controlled services evaluation that can serve as catalyst for exchanging, explaining, and defending field-specific methods and theoretical perspectives. A work group of leading social psychologists and mental health services researchers will collaborate on the data analysis of an experimental evaluation of two widely disseminated, but very different, models of mental health service, PACT and ICCD Clubhouse. The Massachusetts Employment Intervention Demonstration Project (MA EIDP), funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) from 1995-2000, will provide 4 years of outcome and service data on 162 persons with serious mental illness, with a minimum of two and one-half year follow-up per participant. Social psychologists serving as co-investigators will include Elliot Aronson (UCSC), John Harvey (U of Iowa), and Gifford Weary (Ohio State). Psychiatric service researchers will include William Hargreaves (UCSF Medical School), Leonard Bickman (Vanderbilt), and Courtenay Harding (Boston U). Consultation in forensics, managed care issues, cultural and gender issues, and statistics will be provided by William Fisher (Umass Medical School), Paul Barreira (McLean Hospital, Harvard), Paulette Hines (UMDNJ), Nydia Garcia-Preto (Rutgers), and Patrick Shrout (NYU). An ethnographer with expertise in cross-discipline research Tanya Luhrmann (U of Chicago) will provide a qualitative evaluation of research collaboration. The primary communication modality will be a computer listserv, an electronic discussion group accessed via the internet. The research team will respond individually to these postings and to one another's comments. The project will produce joint publications of findings, theoretical causal models of service delivery, and collaborative proposals for testing these models in future research. An interactive Advisory Council, composed of leading vocational service researchers, consumers, family members, state officials, and service model representatives will provide consultation and collaboration on method, policy, and practice issues.
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