Evidence-based psychosocial interventions for family members of people with serious mental illnesses (SMI), and good clinical practices involving family in their relative's care when appropriate, have both been shown to benefit adults with SMI (""""""""consumers"""""""") and their family members. Programs such as family psycho-education (FPE) assist families of people with SMI and help optimize their constructive care-giving involvement. As such these evidence-based practices have been included in various recent standards of quality mental health care. However, their dissemination and implementation have been seriously hampered by various obstacles. Work to ameliorate these obstacles and optimize family involvement has rarely included inquiry into the roles, experiences, or views of adults with SMI. Yet consumers are the primary channel through which providers contact and engage family members. The omission of a consumer perspective leaves critical gaps in the knowledge we can bring to resolve the challenges of family engagement and involvement, including the implementation of FPE and similar interventions. Bridging those gaps would likely improve family engagement, the quality of mental health services as they are actually delivered, consumer experiences, and would facilitate relevant research. Therefore, this study will ask adults with SMI about their experiences, roles, opinions, and meaning-making regarding family involvement in their clinical care and illness management, towards developing a theory of consumer perspectives on family involvement. It will do so through individual in- depth interviews and later focus-group discussions. The project will be enhanced by the input of an ongoing consumer advisory group. The entire project will be conducted within a constructivist grounded theory qualitative research paradigm. Participants will be recruited at several regional self-help organizations of people with SMI and several community mental health agencies in order to enroll a wide variety of consumers with a diversity of mental health involvement and family relationships. Data from this study will elucidate important aspects of consumers' perspectives and roles regarding family involvement, allowing us to build a conceptual model / theory that we will then apply and test through a later R-01 application. Study results will also be applied directly to inform and improve relevant research, consumer roles in family involvement, family engagement in psychosocial interventions (including FPE), and evaluation, and may have policy implications. Data from this study will elucidate important aspects of consumers' perspectives and roles regarding family involvement, allowing us to build a conceptual model / theory that we will then apply and test through a later R-01 application. Study results will also be applied directly to inform and improve relevant research, consumer roles in family involvement, family engagement in psychosocial interventions (including FPE), and evaluation, and may have policy implications. ? ? ?
