An Intervention Framework for Collaboration

Abstract

A growing number of specialized human service professionals and their organizations are changing their relations with each other. These new relations are focused on a variety of new linkages, interchanges, transactions, and exchanges, and they share common features. For example, all tend to be lumped together as "a collaborative approach." And all derive from a dual awareness. Standalone professionals and agencies are ill equipped to meet cooccurring and interlocking human needs, and these professionals and agencies fundamentally depend on each other to achieve results.Reflecting these new relations, terms such as interprofessional collaboration, interorganizational collaboration, family centered, collaboration, community collaboration, and service integration, enjoy increasing popularity among planners, policy makers, and practitioners. Furthermore, a growing number of researchers are studying collaboration, integrated services, or some combination (Lawson, 2004;Bronstein, 2002;Gil de Gibaja, 2001;Hassett & Austin, 1997). At the same time, college and university courses focused on collaboration, integrated services, and coordinated services appear to be increasing.In brief, multiple changes are underway in diverse parts of the United States and elsewhere in the world. Where social and health service professionals and their agencies are concerned, an overarching goal drives these diverse efforts. The goal is to improve service access, quality, efficiency, and effectiveness in order to improve results. As pressures mount for outcomes accountability, changes aimed at improved services and results may escalate.The fact remains, however, that change is not the same as improvement, and neither change nor improvement automatically yields better results. In fact, pervasive change may result in inefficiencies, create performance gaps, and yield AGENCIES AND PROGRAMS An Intervention Framework for Collaboration Nancy Claiborne & Hal A. Lawson ABSTRACTThis paper provides an intervention framework for collaboration to improve services. When collaboration is an intervention, its development and effectiveness depend on intervention logic.Intervention logic requires a precise conceptualization of collaboration. This conceptualization emphasizes its vital and unique components. It includes a developmental progression in which collaboration is contrasted with companion concepts. It also includes progress benchmarks, outcome measures, and logic models. These models depict relations among the benchmarks and outcomes, and they identify the mediating and moderating variables that account for collaboration's development and effectiveness. These models are designed to improve planning, evaluation, and their relations. This intervention framework for collaboration contrasts sharply with other conceptualizations and strategies. Although its aim is to unify and improve collaboration policy and practice, its inherent selectivity is an obvious limitation.

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