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Abstract: 

Dissemination of evidence-based practices is an important goal for the child mental health field, and randomized controlled efficacy trials in academic centers have yielded potentially valuable information about promising psychological treatments for numerous child and adolescent disorders and problems. The extent to which the findings can be generalized to youths and families seen outside academic trials, however, still needs to be assessed because there are many differences between mental health service settings and the contexts of most academic clinical trials. These differences also mean that research in practice settings will need to involve study designs and procedures that differ somewhat from those of a traditional randomized controlled trial and that issues will need to be addressed that do not typically arise in traditional trials. This paper outlines five challenges associated with moving evidence-based research into clinical practice settings for effectiveness testing—client diagnosis and comorbidity, client diversity, referral vs. recruitment, assessment content, and treatment coverage.

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Affiliations:  1: Judge Baker Children’s Center, Harvard Medical School; 2: Judge Baker Children’s Center, Harvard Medical School; 3: Department of Psychology, University of Hawaii at Manoa; 4: Department of Psychology, University of Hawaii at Manoa; 5: Duke University Medical Center.