Measuring Individualized Parent Advocate Services in Children’s Mental Health: A Contextualized Theoretical Application

Scant research literature exists documenting the details of services rendered by peer support providers and their relative impact on children and families. The specific services delivered by peer providers, how the provision of such services are determined and tailored to the needs of individual families, and the tools used to gather services information are largely unknown. We examined how “parent advocates” in the state of Ohio conducted their work with families served through publicly funded children’s mental health services. In partnership with the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) Ohio, we qualitatively explored the services provided by parent advocates to families with children experiencing emotional and behavioral health challenges. We conducted semi-structured focus groups and individual interviews with 11 adult parent advocates operating in two metropolitan counties of Ohio. The findings include an account of the specific service activities in which the advocates engage with families, a description of how advocates plan and provide individualized and culturally responsive care to families, and advocates’ definitions of success. The study further resulted in the development of the Family Advocate Services Checklist (FASC), a tool to assist NAMI Ohio in gathering advocate services data. We discuss the findings with regard to grounding peer support provider approaches in theory (social support and empowerment), the juxtaposition of individualized and culturally responsive care for children and families through peer support providers, and how the FASC can be used to document advocate services and tie them to child and family outcomes in future studies.