Applying a Theory of Change Approach to Interagency Planning in Child Mental Health

Abstract

This paper describes the use of a theory of change approach to community-based cross-agency service planning for children with serious emotional disturbance and their families. Public agency planners in Contra Costa County, California used the theory of change approach to organize service planning for a population of youth who had been arrested and involved with juvenile probation. The theory of change process described in this paper links community outcomes with planned activities with the assumptions or principles that underlie the community planning efforts. When complete, a theory of change logic model can serve as a guide for implementation, ensuring that community plans for service delivery remain true to their intent. The theory of change development process includes twelve stages and is based on a step-by-step approach. Theory of change logic models establish a context for articulating a community's shared beliefs and prompt local stakeholders to establish logical connections between the population to be served, expected results, and strategies intended to achieve those results.

Theory of Change: a theory-driven approach to enhance the Medical Research Council's framework for complex interventions

“…In their program, a community youth committee was involved in the development of the logic model and provided input into the content and delivery format of the intervention resulting in a more relevant, feasible and sustainable intervention. Similarly, Hernandez and Hodges [42] used ToC developed with stakeholders to organize services for youth in contact with the juvenile justice system. They found that ToC assisted with creating a shared vision among stakeholders which promoted service integration across a variety of sectors.…”

A framework to expand public services to children with biomedical healthcare needs related to HIV in the Free State, South Africa

“…Kellogg Foundation, 2004;Hernandez & Hodges, 2006). This type of logic model illustrates why a specific idea for a given programme is pursued.…”

“…Emphasis is placed on the 'bigger picture' or the whole. This allows reflection on the function of a system's parts based on their relationships with one another and within the system's larger context (Hernandez & Hodges, 2006;Frechtling, 2007). The larger context in this study refers to the healthcare system in which biomedical services are rendered to children exposed to or infected by HIV.…”

Using a Theory of Change to Drive Human Resource Development for Wraparound

“…Key informant interviews (Walker et al 2003), review of wraparound training manuals and other program materials (Walker and Bruns 2006b), and observations of wraparound teams (Walker and Schutte 2005) yielded initial information regarding outcomes being sought, and how activities might be causally connected to outcomes. Again, as is often the case in post hoc program theory development (Donaldson 2007;Hernandez and Hodges 2006;Savaya and Waysman 2005), different individuals and different sources offered different ideas about why wraparound caused positive impacts and, for the most part, the actual rationales for these causal connections between activities and outcomes were described rather vaguely. Nevertheless, combining the information across these sources yielded good information about the intermediate-and longerterm outcomes that were typically assumed to result from wraparound, as well as a diverse set of ideas about how and why wraparound activities might contribute to the outcomes.…”