Measuring Community Inclusion

Tracking Community Mobility: An R Program for Cleaning and Creating Constructs from GPS Data

Community mobility is often a prerequisite to community participation of individuals with disabilities. Recently, researchers have started using Global Positioning Systems (GPS) to examine people’s community mobility. However, because GPS data are often very messy, substantial data cleaning needs to happen before measures of community mobility can be generated. This program describes and implements the data cleaning steps, and goes on to create several community mobility variables from GPS data. These variables include the number of destinations and unique destinations the individuals visited; the time individuals spent at home, at non-home destinations, and in transit; the total distance they traveled; and the size of their activity space (areas within which individuals travel around for their daily activities)

Community Participation and Inclusion: Shifting Perspectives on Quality Measures

This monograph reviews recommendations from the Temple  University Collaborative that encourage the behavioral managed care industry, as well as federal, state, and local mental health administrators to systematically assess the community participation needs of service recipients and the success of provider agencies in meeting those needs

Inclusion in Research

One of the core activities of the Temple University Collaborative is conducting research in order to develop cutting-edge knowledge and tools to promote the inclusion and participation of individuals with psychiatric disabilities. We believe individuals with psychiatric disabilities have a right to be included in all aspects of the research process, including as research participants. Sometimes, Institutional Review Boards (IRB) doubt whether this population is competent to participate in research. This brief document was developed to help researchers develop consent procedures that 1) ensure participants understand study procedures and 2) demonstrate that this population has the capacity to consent to research participation.

Peer Facilitated Community Inclusion Tool Kit

Peers can play a critically important and unique role in supporting increased community participation among individuals with serious mental illnesses. Our toolkit is an excellent resource to help peers explore goals for increasing community participation with the consumers they work with. This toolkit includes various exercises and worksheets that peers can use to help individuals reflect on desired levels of community participation, explore existing supports and resources, and develop community participation goals. Special thanks to Matthew Federici, MS, CPRP, Executive Director of the Copeland Center for Wellness and Recovery, for his editorial contribution and support for this document. For more information on our partnership with the Copeland Center, please visit their website here.

The Collaborative Interim Report: Responses to Presentations and Website Resources

The impact of the presentations and publications of the Temple University Collaborative are assessed in this report, based on responses to online questionnaires sent to individuals who had received materials or training from the Collaborative during its first five years of operation.

Community Integration and Measuring Community Participation

This paper identifies specific strategies that you can use to measure consumer participation in community activities, with separate instrumentation for each of eight domains of community life, providing an effective and wide-used vehicle for assessing your program’s achievements in promoting community inclusion.