Developing a Randomization Protocol in a Community-Partnered Participatory Research Project to Reduce the Burden of Depression

• Activity Number: 350
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 3, 2010 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Health Policy Statistics Section
• Author(s): Thomas R. Belin*+ and Susan E. Stockdale and Lingqi Tang and Felica Jones and Andrea Jones and Aziza Wright and Judy Perlman and Esmeralda Ramos and Loretta Jones and Elizabeth Dixon and Kenneth B. Wells
• Companies: University of California, Los Angeles and University of California, Los Angeles and University of California, Los Angeles and Healthy African American Families II and Healthy African American Families II and Healthy African American Families II and RAND Corporation and University of California, Los Angeles and Healthy African American Families II and Queenscare and University of California, Los Angeles
• Keywords: community-partnered participatory research ; randomization ; depression ; health services

Abstract

Community Partners in Care (CPIC) is a collaborative research project seeking to reduce the burden of depression in vulnerable populations. Building on earlier evidence of the efficacy of "collaborative care" health-services interventions, the CPIC study uses a community partnered participatory research (CPPR) framework to compare two strategies for implementing evidence-based depression treatments with clients of primary-care clinics, social-service agencies, mental-health/substance-abuse agencies, faith-based organizations, or other community-trusted locations. The study calls for randomization of programs to either a more intensive or a less intensive implementation approach. We discuss how the CPPR framework requires attention to even the most basic steps of a randomization protocol, e.g., an approach we used to produce seeds for random-number generation in a collaborative effort.