The goal of the proposed study is to do a process-oriented program evaluation of the Critical Time Intervention (CTI) (Susser & Valencia, 1997), an innovative approach to prevent recurrent homelessness in a group of mentally ill men. CTI was designed to prevent homelessness by improving the continuity of care for individuals being discharged from institutional to community living. (CTI group=48, control group=48). CTI workers provided services based on both clinical judgment and clients' assessments of their service needs. While many interventions with this group fail because of disagreements between clients and service providers, CTI bridges this gap by allowing a collaborative alliance between the two. The results of this controlled study ;showed that CTI was effective in reducing homeless nights. However, although this major outcome assessment has been done, it is still not clear what about the program was effective with which clients under what circumstances.
The specific aims of this study will be to examine several other process and outcome variab1es of the CTI intervention, such as range and frequency of services used by men in the CTI group, the type of housing CTI clients gravitated to, and their quality of life ratings as compared to men in the control group. Schizophrenic symptomatology and substance abuse will be examined as possible modifiers of CTI' S effect. This information will then be used to refine the design of CTI, in order to use it with mentally ill individuals discharged from a state hospital into the community.
