Families as full research partners: What's in it for us?

This article describes a children's managed mental health care program that incorporates both a family participation service model and a family-initia ted evaluation model. The authors begin by tracing the evolution of the fam ily support and the participatory research movements leading to current dev elopments in children's mental health services research. In the King County Blended Funding Project, three service systems pool funds that are spent f lexibly by child and family teams. Family advocates have led efforts to des ign and implement the project evaluation. During this process, many tension s have arisen between meeting the demands of both scientific rigor and mult iple community stakeholders. Examples are given of the issues raised by fam ily advocates and research scientists as together they established a theory of change, identified meaningful outcomes, selected measurement tools, and implemented the evaluation protocol. Guidelines are given for how services research partnerships can be successfully built to better address communit y needs. This article was selected as a distinguished research paper based on a pres entation by the authors at the 1998 11th annual research conference titled "A System of Care for Children's Mental Health: Expanding the Research Base ." This conference is sponsored annually by the Research and Training Cente r for Children's Mental Health, Department of Child and Family Studies, Lou is de Ea Parte Florida Mental Health Institute, University of South Florida , Tampa.