Society for Social Work and Research 17th Annual Conference: Social Work for a Just Society: Making Visible the Stakes and Stakeholders

January 16 - 20, 2013

The gap between research and practice is well-documented and a concern in social work and related fields. Increasing numbers of mental health interventions have been developed and tested using stringent controlled research with an eye toward efficacy. While efforts have been made to implement and disseminate these interventions, few are regularly applied in community-based settings. Social work is committed to practice decisions being based on evidence from scientific research. Effectiveness research is crucial to identify treatment modifications and extend and test an intervention’s applicability to broader client and provider populations and “real-world” practice situations.

This symposium will focus on studies of evidence-based interventions being delivered in the community to underserved populations. Stakeholders critical to this conversation include community providers, clients and families, and social work researchers. Essential to this process are university-agency-community partnerships, adaptations of evidence-based practices, integrating cultural competence and evidence-based practice, implementing evidence based practices in real world settings, the acceptability, feasibility, and sustainability of the evidence-informed interventions, and the evaluation and outcome data on their effectiveness. Four papers will be presented. The first paper focuses on the implementation science, community-based and participatory in nature, integral to the development of an evidence-informed home-based program for military families with young children. Important CBP outcomes included the development of military-civilian partnerships, use of community member feedback to change research design, and translation of research findings to intervention development. The second paper examines the dissemination and effectiveness of a group cognitive behavioral intervention for hoarding in a community mental health setting. Group participants demonstrated improvement in hoarding symptoms. The third paper, describes quantitative outcomes of Project BRIGHT, an adaptation of evidence-based Child-Parent Psychotherapy, for mothers with children birth to five in residential treatment for substance use disorders. Treatment group mothers improved in psychological distress, which was associated with better parenting attitudes and improved parent-child interactions. The fourth paper focuses on “MOMCare,” culturally relevant treatment services for perinatal depression in a diverse sample of low income, pregnant women.  Findings suggest improvement in antenatal depression. In addition to their outcome data, each presenter will describe specific successful experiences and barriers in developing and implementing evidence-based interventions.

This topic is important and timely given the still limited dissemination and implementation of evidence informed interventions in the community and the crucial need to provide quality effective culturally relevant mental health services and training. This symposium focuses on effectiveness research for diverse mental health problems (e.g., trauma, substance use, depression, and hoarding), settings (e.g., community mental health clinics, home-based, public health centers), and interventions (e.g., IPT, CBT) . Social workers have a vital role in the development, dissemination, and implementation of evidence and community informed interventions as they are the largest providers of mental health services, connect with other intervention agents, and are increasingly involved in intervention research. The development and testing of evidence- and community-informed interventions is especially critical given dwindling resources in the face of a growing complex myriad of problems. When it comes to practice decision-making, there is a lot at stake.